#672: Emotional Vitality: Hope and the Neuroscience of Small Wins

To start this off, I want to talk about how your body is not broken.

It is trying to help you.

It is sending you signals, sometimes as symptoms, to tell you that something is off and to help you understand how to fix it, not because it's broken.

Almost everything I'm going to talk about grows out of that today.

And this episode is about one single word, hope.

And I know how that word can land for some people.

I know how it used to land for my gin.

It sounds soft.

It sounds woo-woo, maybe.

Sounds like something on a poster on a wall, maybe not an actual health strategy.

But I've spent my entire career in supplementation.

That's the lane that I've been in, and I love it.

But after years of doing this work and walking alongside people in some of the darkest places that I've ever seen a human being go, I've become convinced of something that surprised me.

Hope is one of the most powerful tools in the entire toolbox.

It sits ahead of supplementation, it sits ahead of diet change, not instead of those things, ahead of them, because a person who does not have hope doesn't take a supplement, doesn't change the diet, doesn't take the next step at all.

And a person who finds even a flicker of it will do things that looked impossible even just a week before.

And to illustrate that point just a little bit more, specific to maybe you listening, if you are trying, which you are because you're listening to Vitality Radio, but if you felt stuck or you know someone, I just barely got off the phone recording this before recording this with one of my longtime clients whose daughter is really struggling with some health issues and she's willing to make a change now and hasn't been in the past.

But if you're trying, if you're listening to shows like this, if you're ordering supplements from our website or from anywhere, if you're going to see a functional medicine doctor or whatever it is you're doing, then you at least have a sliver of hope.

And that's critical.