#32 Becoming More Mindful of Stress Management with Teemu Arina

Teemu Arina (0:00)

Entertainment, that's all happening in your mind. It's mental masturbation, it's not taking you anywhere. I think the separation of the mind and the body is a huge issue that kind of resolves in people's inability to recognize the warning signals that they're getting, or to be able to even know what to do. It's a badge of honor. If you live that story, it becomes you. In the end, there is not overwhelming things in the world.

I don't think so. It's how you relate to them.

Siim Land (0:35)

Body, mind, empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:42)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:44)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:47)

Welcome to the Body, Mind, Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today we have Teemu Arina from Finland as our guest, and he's an entrepreneur and one of the authors of the Biohacker's Handbook as well.

And Teemu, I want to welcome you to the show.

Teemu Arina (1:07)

Thank you so much Siim for this invitation and I'm delighted to be here.

Siim Land (1:12)

Yeah, I really, I'm a huge fan of your work, what you do with the Biohacker Summit and the Biohacker's book as well. And I believe like your next book is gonna be about biohacking stress, am I right?

Teemu Arina (1:28)

Yes, that's right. So the first book was about diving deep into sleep, exercise, nutrition, mind and work and how those can be seen as systems.

And then we dive into the methods and tools and interventions that you can use to optimize those systems. And we look at the different ways of measuring, figuring out what works and what doesn't. And so the biohacking stress book is going to be a continuation on that, where we look more on the nervous system side. That kind of came out in the work that we did pretty rapidly that stress seems to be behind a lot of issues, sleeping problems. You could look at chronic fatigue of people have been exercising too much when it comes to work. I mean, that's a huge issue nowadays. So we decided to work on a separate book on this topic. So I'm working on the Bikers Handbook with my co-authors, nutrition specialist, Jakko Hallettan, medical doctor, Olli Sobjarvi.

And I'm a technologist, but you know, we are all kind of well versed in the secret arts of technology and medicine, wellness and health. And we are kind of looking at those things as infinitely intriguing and interesting areas and avenues to get to terms with what it means to be human.

Siim Land (2:53)

Yeah, like you said, the stress aspect of modern life, it deserves a whole new book for itself.

And if you look at our environments, then we're more comfortable than ever before. We can eat all of these delicious food we want as much as we want, and we can entertain ourselves, but people are still so stressed out and a lot of people are suffering from chronic stress. So why do you think, like, why are we so stressed out as a species at the moment?

Teemu Arina (3:25)

I mean, we are lacking the balance that nature gave us. So if we start from the nervous system, I mean, looking at the autonomous nervous system, you have the sympathetic nervous system response, you have the parasympathetic nervous system response, the balance between those two, that usually is between rest and being active and hunting for food or looking for a mate. I mean, that part is now an overdrive. I mean, we get bombarded by signals on a constant basis through media, social media. You know, the working life today is full of constant interruption. If someone else is not interrupting us, it's ourselves who is interrupting ourselves. And we are not connected enough to nature or rooted in nature. I mean, people living in cities, it's such a hectic environment. It's just from the standpoint of our basic biology, it is triggering a lot of different stress responses with very loud noises. And I mean, you can go very deep with this if you look at air quality, that's another stressor. So I really like this specific app on my phone that shows me the air quality in different areas. And I mean, I live in Finland and that's kind of nice.

But when I was traveling in Southeast Asia and bigger cities, I realized how important quality air is. So there's two apps, one of them is called AirVisual and the other one is called AirMatters. And it shows you the particle count in the air and the pollution level. And when you look at the particle count, there is these very small microscopic particles, PM 2.5 and those go straight to your bloodstream and they will increase all cause mortality. So, I mean, that's one aspect. Then, I mean, just like light pollution, biohackers are very well aware about the issues when it comes to blue light, which is the spectrum of light related to daylight and how that messes up our circadian rhythms. If we get exposed to it at the wrong time of the day, it's usually reserved for the day, but people, I mean, they're looking at their mobile phones, they're looking at their laptops and LCD, LCD televisions, and they're just out of balance. And when it comes to diet, that's another thing. I mean, the whole mass production of food, it's great. I mean, it's feeding us, but at the same time, it's narrowing down our choices. Supermarket is pretty much like, if you just look at the middle islets, usually the middle parts of any kind of supermarket, it's all these dry products.