Practice Vedic (primordial sound) meditation twice a day for 45 minutes to deeply drop in, quickly restore, and improve anxiety, stress, cognitive abilities, energy, joy, happiness, reactivity, and focus, ultimately enhancing life rather than just meditation skills.
Prioritize fixing your biology through proper nutrition to enhance your emotional, psychological, and spiritual life, as nutritional deficiencies and poor diet can hinder mental clarity and well-being, making it hard to ‘become enlightened’.
View food as information and programming for your biology, understanding that every bite can upgrade or downgrade your health by changing gene expression, hormones, brain chemistry, microbiome, and immune system in real time.
Prioritize gut health to improve mental health, cognitive function, focus, attention, and meditation ability, as eating poorly affects the mind and microbiome, and ‘gut health is mental health’.
Before eating, pause and ask yourself two questions: ‘What am I feeling?’ and ‘What do I need?’ to distinguish true hunger from emotional eating and address underlying needs.
Adopt the ‘Pegan’ (Paleo-Vegan) diet principles by eating real, unprocessed foods that your great-grandmother would recognize, and always check ingredient labels for familiar items, avoiding those with unpronounceable or unfamiliar chemicals.
Focus your diet on plant-rich foods, including non-starchy vegetables, good fats from avocados, nuts, and seeds, and whole grains and beans, to support overall health and good gut bacteria.
Eliminate or drastically reduce consumption of sugar, starch, chemicals, additives, high fructose corn syrup, refined soybean oil, and white flour, as these processed commodities are major contributors to health problems and negatively impact brain function.
Use mindfulness or meditation to observe how you feel after eating certain foods, as this awareness can help you connect the dots between diet and well-being, leading to better food choices.
Seek out or create small groups and community support to facilitate behavior change, as peer pressure, connection, and love are powerful drivers for improving health and well-being, and addressing loneliness.
Actively address feelings of loneliness and disconnection by seeking community and support, as these emotions can lead to using food to assuage suffering.
If following a vegan diet, be diligent about supplementing for potential deficiencies in omega-3s, iron, zinc, and other nutrients to ensure it remains a healthy way of eating.
Avoid eating animals from factory farms due to their detrimental impact on animals, human health, and the environment.
Support and advocate for regenerative agriculture, which integrates animals and specific farming techniques (cover crops, crop rotations, no chemicals) to regenerate soil, conserve water, and reverse climate change.
Actively work to reduce food waste in your household, as 40% of food is thrown away, contributing to methane emissions in landfills and significant economic loss.
Exercise your power as a consumer by making conscious food choices and demanding healthier, more sustainably produced products, as this influences big food companies to change their practices.
Engage in citizen action to drive change in food policies and the food system, recognizing that individual choices and collective advocacy have enormous influence.
Cultivate optimism, as studies suggest optimists tend to live longer, regardless of whether their positive outlook is always factually correct.
Recognize that yoga is a preparation for meditation, not a replacement for it, to avoid ‘conning yourself’ out of a deeper, more transformative practice.
Adopt a ‘systems thinking’ approach to health, focusing on understanding and treating the root causes of disease rather than just managing symptoms, as advocated by functional medicine.
Tune into the 10% Happier Election Sanity series every Monday in October to cultivate qualities for steadiness and calm during election season, helping you navigate tumult and toxicity.
Visit 10percent.com/reward to claim a special discount for the 10% Happier app, which provides high-quality meditation teachers.
To learn more about food as medicine, the food system, and actionable steps for health, visit foodfixbook.com for resources and the Action Guide, or drhyman.com and his podcast ‘The Doctor’s Pharmacy’.
Help improve the 10% Happier podcast by taking a few minutes to complete the survey at 10percent.com/survey.