How Happy Is Dr. Oz?
Dr. Andrew Weil, author of the new book Spontaneous Happiness, chats with friend and colleague, Dr. Mehmet Oz, about the blues, beating afternoon sugar cravings (yes, he gets them too), and why he was once known as “The Mad Turk.”
INTERVIEW
Andrew Weil: You have an incredibly demanding work life and you’re always expected to be positive. What do you do to maintain your emotional equilibrium? Do you ever get down?
Mehmet Oz: Oh, I get down. It’s interesting, I don’t know anyone who puts themselves out there who doesn’t feel insecurity, who doesn’t feel a sense of doom and gloom periodically. Folks are always coming up to me and saying, “You have a charmed life and you’re lucky about this or that,” but most of my days I spend thinking about worries that could easily get you down. You know, I did an aortic valve operation this morning. We did a stitch to repair a hole in the heart, and it didn’t work. That is not a calming moment. But what I’ve learned—and a lot of folks have wandered down this path with me—is that you can develop some equipoise, some ability to understand that it’s never as good as it is, or as bad as it is either. Find the blessings in the people around you because they’re the ones that support your life. It’s the nurse that says, “Here, I’ll do this stitch for you,” and it’s just in the calming way she says it that brings you comfort because she has confidence in you. And on the show—you’ve been to our stage many times—it’s nice to have a Stage Manager because she’ll point you this way or that, she’ll cover you, and those kinds of little efforts I find hugely valuable. It gives me this sense of calm in the middle of a storm.
AW: What are some other tricks in your daily lifestyle that you think help you maintain emotional equilibrium?
MO: You know that I have not always had this level of… calm. They used to call me “The Mad Turk” because I would lose my temper so often. I’d get thrown out of sporting events because I’d get into scuffles with the other players. But I realized I needed automation in my life, some constancy so that I didn’t have to keep making decisions every moment of the day.
If you examine your life, think about all the decisions you had to make today but you didn’t really have to make. For example, What am I having for breakfast? What am I going to do after this event is done? All those things force you to expend chi [or energy]. For me, it’s not about time management, it’s about energy management. If I lose energy deciding things I don’t have to decide, then I wear down my reserve and I start making poor decisions. We’ve seen this in multiple studies, by the way, which is why you get those mid-afternoon downs, because you’ve depleted [energy making decisions] and you need sugar to make additional decisions.
I don’t know if you saw this remarkable piece recently. They’re looking at parole boards in Israel, and it turns out that the parole boards give far more paroles in the morning than the afternoon. It’s irrational because they’re the same kinds of cases. But what happens is what happens to all of us: the judges get tired. And as you get tired toward the end of the day, you’re unwilling to make creative decisions. So just to keep your brain moving, you feed yourself some sugar—which y’all out there do, and I do. It’s not the best thing to do late in the afternoon but we all do it.
I try to automate my life. I get up in the morning and I do my seven minutes of yoga and my calisthenics. I think it’s hugely valuable for bringing a sense of calm, because one thing you do control is your body—even if you don’t control things around you. And then you know what you’re going to have for breakfast, you know when you’re going to get into work, the first things [you’re] going to do [when you get there]. I don’t change those things ever, so when it gets to midday, I haven’t made too many decisions. I’ve done lots of things, but haven’t made many decisions. Then I can use the information that’s coming in throughout the day to guide my decisions more rationally.
AW: You interact with an awful lot of people on your show and, like me, you see many, many people today who are depressed. What are your thoughts on why we’re seeing epidemic depression in our country?
MO: I think we have an epidemic because we have lost the unique art of being comfortable with discomfort. And I think about human history. We’ve always had the ability to weather the storms as they hit us. I even think about things like kids playing sports. If a kid has a tough coach who makes him uncomfortable because he wants to build him up and make him better, or a [if you’ve got a] tough boss in the workforce, they’re thought of as just that—tough, unnecessarily difficult.
Instead of pulling back, I’ve told my kids that every time I give them something that I didn’t have, I take away from them something that I did have. Every time we prevent some challenge from coming in front of the people that we love, we prevent them from learning from those challenges. We should be very careful about how we use the influence in our lives to make life too easy for those around us.
Not that I’m going to make life difficult on purpose. But let people be challenged, and let it be okay that they’re uncomfortable, because that’s how we will grow.
Andrew Weil, M.D., is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, a healing oriented approach to health care which encompasses body, mind, and spirit.
This interview originally appeared on Everyday Health.
