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Episode #481 - Listener Questions: “I’m In My Fifties And Got Laid Off. What Should I Do?”
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." -Herbert Simon.
I would add that it creates a poverty of intention. Man, it's easy to get overwhelmed these days.
INTRODUCTION
Hey there. Welcome to the Retirement Answer Man Show. This is Roger Whitney. I'm your host, and this is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to lean in and really rock retirement regardless of what's going on in the world.
Boy, we need to be intentional in order to do that.
Today we're going to focus on your questions. In fact, this entire month we're focusing on answering your questions and we got some great, great questions. We have some great questions on short-term bonds versus cash, Roth IRAs, and comments regarding widowhood.
A lot of great stuff. In addition to that, we're going to bring on Dr. Bobby Dubois to help us focus on how to build energy so we can show up and be intentional. Super cool stuff.
Before we get going, I have two things I want to share. Number one is May 11th. We are opening up the Rock Retirement Club for new members, so new members can come in and create a retirement plan so they can have a confidence to rock retirement.
We'll have more information on that and we'll have some open houses where you can ask questions and just hang.
Second is we just concluded our survey of you people, you and others that listen to the show and I thought I'd share just some of the high level demographics of the show so you can get an idea of who you're hanging out with every week and focusing on how do we rock retirement? I thought that'd be interesting.
Before I share that, I want to say thank you to the over 1600 people that responded for the encouragement, the kind words, the constructive criticism, and the general spirit of hey, we're all working on this and we're all just working on trying to get better.
Your feedback is welcome, warms my heart and tweaks me where I need to be tweaked in terms of making a better show for you. So thank you for your generosity in doing that. I read every one, Nichole reads every one, and we incorporate that as best we can into the show and what we create for you.
All right, some high level demographics of who you're hanging out with every week here.
First off, male vs female. We have about 65% that are men. 35% that are women. Women have been increasing as a percentage of listeners, which I think is a good thing. We're all managing money and we're all going to trying to rock retirement. Why not? Should be.
How old are you?
Half of you are over 60 years old and the other half are under 60 years old. That makes sense. About 43% of you are between 51 and 60, and there's actually a decent contingent that are in their twenties and thirties, which blows me away. So good mix of people.
Are you currently retired? 40% say yes. 25% say I'm planning on retiring in the next five years. I'm looking at the numbers here. About 13% are planning to retire within the year, and we have 10% who say, I'm in pre-tirement. AKA left full time work, but working part-time. Then about 11% or 12% of you are more than five years away from retirement.
I had a response, someone actually emailed me,
" I'm not going to answer this question because I'm retired, but I'm not going to say that I'm loving it."
That's sort of sad. So hopefully you can find your way to loving it.
We asked, what is your approximate net worth? So this is the net value of your assets versus your liabilities.
I'm going to combine some things here. Let's see. About 33% have a net worth less than $1 million. 30% have a net worth between one and two million. 21% have a net worth between two and three million, and then 12% have a net worth between three and four million, and then about 20% of you have a net worth over four million.
So that's the demographics from a financial standpoint.
There's some interesting things and we asked a lot of questions, and I may share some more of this. Here's a few things I'll share. 33% of you work in retirement and the rest don't plan on working at all in retirement. About 53% of you do not work with a financial advisor. Interestingly, 46% of you do work with an advisor, and that's actually increased over time. I think that's a good thing because if you do work with an advisor, you need to be extracting the value you're getting from that advisor and being a better partner in that relationship by knowing your stuff and being intentional is going to make them better so you can collaborate better. Which I think is awesome.
There are some demographics for the show, and with that, let's move on and answer your questions.
LISTENER QUESTIONS
Now it's time to answer your questions. If you have a question for the show, you can go to rogerwhitney.com/askroger. You can leave an audio question. You can leave a written question and we'll do our best to get it on the show. You can actually leave an audio or a typed message if you just want to say hey Roger, how are you doing?
Tell me something you want to tell me. You can find that at rogerwhitney.com/askroger.
Before we get to your questions, I want to thank Chris Bentley from wingsforwidows.org. He came on two weeks ago to share his wisdom in the mission of their organization where they are doing triage for widows and widowers, helping them at that initial stage to find their sea legs. They're a safe place for people to get assistance, when you're really awash in the sea and not sure where to go. So, Chris, I want to thank you. We're going to have you on the show again for sure. Wingsforwidows.org is a great organization. I do also want to apologize. I had a really off day, evidently, I think I forgot his last name. I mispronounced the organization at the end of the interview. It was a little embarrassing. I'm sorry about that. We all have off days. Perfect. Let's get better.
QUESTION ONE
Now let's get to your questions. I had someone email me privately. It was Brian, a listener, and just said,
"Hey Roger, you might think about doing this.
I was at a party recently and there were five people in their fifties at this party that were recently laid off, and this might be something that's happening in this season in 2023. Maybe it's something you might want to address."
That's a great idea, Brian. So, let's address this and think of this as triage.
You are in your fifties on your way towards thinking about retirement at some point in the future. You've been in your career, maybe in the same position or in the same industry for years. You're right on that final approach to starting to think about life with less work or no work, and then all of a sudden, the engines go out. You are laid off, and now you're a 50 something year old person, and what do I do next?
That can be a very tough wake up call. Where do I go from here? Do I get another job? Could I retire today? How am I going to pay my bills? I had all these plans that are either going to have to get accelerated or maybe put off. I don't know where I'm going to go next. That's a lot of the mix that we may be thinking about.
How do you gain your footing if you were laid off unexpectedly?
Let's think through this. Let's build a structure that if you're in this situation, you can grab onto as a framework. If you're not in this situation, maybe you should think through this framework to prepare a parachute plan in the event that the unexpected happens.
Let's start with the financial side.
What do you do first?
First, you want to observe. You want to gather information for where you're at. What is your monthly cash flow? What do you spend per month? Get a handle on that because that's your burn rate. That's the money you need to continue the life of you, and you want to understand that flow.
Maybe you budget on an ongoing basis. Maybe you haven't done budgeting forever. If you're in your fifties, generally you're making more money than you've ever made. It's easy not to budget because you have so much cash flow to cover the expenses coming in or going out that you don't pay attention to this.
Either way, put a number on hey, I need this per month to live. This is what I'm spending right now. That's important to know. And even if you've never done budgeting, you can get a moving average. Just looking at your bank account statements, understand what that number is. I need $8,000 a month to live.
Number two, how much liquidity do you have? Go check that. How much cash reserve do you have that are your emergency fund, just cash and savings account, et cetera, because that is the money that you're going to likely use initially to fill the gap because your income has gone away, but you still have these monthly expenses.
So, it's important to know how much cash reserves you have so you can understand how long you have runway wise until that money is gone. This reserve is going to absorb the initial impact of losing your job. That's sort of the, the financial airbag in life.
We want to know that number. You also want to know your net worth, so this is a time to update your net worth, which is simply a one sheet of listing out all of your assets, my bank accounts, your savings accounts, your retirement accounts, your IRA, your 401k, any assets you have in terms of real estate, et cetera.
Anything you have that has value, I'd probably put aside personal property, like your couch and stuff like that. You don't have to get that detailed; I don't think. And then list out all of your assets on the left side of the sheet and on the right side of the sheet, list out any debts you have.
Car loan, mortgage, credit card debt, what have you, and then total that at the bottom and subtract your debt from your net worth, and now you have a dashboard to see, oh, this is where all my money is. Any wealth that I've accumulated to this point, this is where it is. Now. You've identified the pieces you have to figure out how to fill the gap.
You also want to see whatever benefits you may get as part of this layoff. Perhaps there is a layoff package that is offered to you where the company is going to give you some assistance, whether that's income for a certain period of time, a lump sum payout. Maybe they're going to cover your healthcare for a period of time.
What are they doing, if anything, because not all companies do something to assist you in this transition. Perhaps they have assistance in terms of helping you find a new job. Some companies will do that as well. Some companies won't do squat, but it's important to observe what might be available to you.
That's going to help you build a dashboard of, okay, this is what I spend a month. Here's my liquidity, I have enough cash to cover one month, two months, five months. That's the initial triage, and then your net worth of what assets do I have to move around so I can figure this out
Once you've observed where you're at right now. You're assessing yourself. Now, you need to orient yourself a little bit. What options do you have to move forward?
First is, how do I fill the gap? I have this monthly expenditure that covers your life. What options do I have to fill that gap? From a spending standpoint, you have some options. Two I can think of initially are what part of that monthly spending that you have is more discretionary, money that isn't needed just for having a good life and covering the groceries and the utilities, et cetera.
That would be things like going to the car wash every week or getting your hair done every week or going to Starbucks or eating out. Those are discretionary spending that perhaps you could slow down during this time of trauma.
Figuring out where you're going to go next, and by slowing those discretionary spending items that could extend the length that your cash reserves could sustain you while you figure out what your next chapter is. That can help fill the gap. Putting some projects on hold that you had planned, maybe it's a new deck, maybe it's a big trip.
Doesn't mean that they're gone forever. It just means you're going to slow down on the planning for them or any expenditures for them while you figure out what your next chapter is. On the flip side, another thing you can evaluate and orient on filling the gap is what income can I have until I find my next chapter?
This could be simply unemployment benefits. You've paid into them for years. Some of us philosophically don't feel comfortable taking unemployment. I say you've paid for it for years. This is something that is meant to be a gap, a safety net to help you transition, so you should use it.
You could start to consider contracting. Is there part-time work I can do, or contract work I can do to help generate income? Is there Uber, is there an opportunity for eBay sales? Are there any other ways that I can make money until I figure out my next chapter in what I'm going to do professionally? Some of these might not even be that important if you have enough liquidity to where you feel like you have a runway.
But if you're scrambling and trying to figure this out, I think you put everything on the table. It doesn't mean you do it, but you want to think about this.
Then when you're orienting, I think another place to orient outside of filling the gap is, is retirement or something else possible? Could I simply retire now or could I simply retire now or go into pre-tirement and have part-time work where I don't have to go find a full-time job initially or right away.
If this is something that you think might be an opportunity in disguise, then you want to go through the process of, is this even possible? You're going to go through an organized process of what do I need, what are my needs, wants and wishes. Is this feasible given all the resources that I have? Get to whether it's feasible or not.
That's a negotiation because it may not be feasible that you don't work ever again, but it might become feasible if you work part-time, if you go half-time, if you find something that's in between that full-time work and not working at all. Then if you're able to get to a feasible plan, then you can work on how I make it resilient so you don't get knocked off course easily.
You'll also find out whether it's feasible or not. So, if it's not feasible, then you really get focused on that job search. This might be an opportunity disguise, but you have to go through a process to think through it in an organized way.
Once you do that, now you can start making just some decisions, okay, I'm going to slow down this spending that's going to give me four months of runway before I run out of my cash reserves.
Perhaps I change some of my investments in order to increase those cash reserves, you can make decisions around filing for unemployment. Do I do COBRA? Understanding the healthcare so you can make sure you have extended healthcare for your family. Do I get my resume updated? Do I use a headhunter? Do I try contracting?
You can start to orient, but if you do these first two things just observe where you're at now and orient to understand the options you have to fill the gap. All of that's important to give you runway so you can make decisions with less pressure. Basic triage. Triage. If someone comes into the hospital, the first thing they do is observe them and stabilize them as best they can so they can figure out the treatments.
This is essentially the same thing you're going to go through.
If you're dealing with a. Those are the areas that I would start in our 6-Shot Saturday email we will share the budgeting form and the net worth form, so in case you haven't done those things, you can have some tools to do that. If you don't have our 6-Shot Saturday email, which is our weekly email where we share resources like this, you can go to rogerwhitney.com. There's a box there on that homepage where you can put in your name and email and you'll get a weekly email with a summary of the show where we share links to resources that we mentioned here, so you can check that out.
QUESTION TWO
So next we have a comment from a listener and actually Rock Retirement Club member Rita.
Rita: Roger. This is Rita. I live in Los Angeles and I'm a member of the RRC. Your topic for this month was very timely. My husband died in January and I'm wondering if there's an existing group or if we could establish a group within the RRC of women in this situation. Maybe meet on a monthly basis by Zoom and just brainstorm and help each other out.
Thanks, bye!
Roger: Rita. That's a great idea.
That is one of the promises of the Rock Retirement Club is having a safe place where you can walk with people that not only are in the same stage of life but dealing with the same challenges as well. Having a safe place to be able to work through these things together. It is a great idea. I'm going to take that to the team, and I hope you are doing well, and thank you for your spirit and such a great suggestion.
QUESTION THREE
Next question comes from Jim related to the debt ceiling.
"Recently the US reached the debt ceiling and deep political divisions and brinksmanship raised the risk of possible default on payments of government obligations and entitlement programs."
This is Jim.
"Experts are warning of dire consequences to investors or recipients of government payments, social security, et cetera. What, if anything, can a retired investor do to protect oneself from these consequences? Is it even possible to protect oneself? Is the best course of action simply to hang on through the wild ride and get to the other side of this event? Or are there some prudent steps that can be taken right now?"
Now that's a great question, Jim.
Let's start off with what the debt ceiling is. Well, it's silly in a way. The debt ceiling is a legislative mandate that caps the amount that the government can borrow. This was set up years ago, and since 1960, it's been raised I think 79 times.
So, the government spends more than it brings in. We borrow money, and there's a mandate of we can only borrow so much money, our credit limit, as they say in the credit card world. When we reach the debt ceiling, we've essentially reached the limit of our ability to borrow more money. And what ends up happening is this political drama that plays out every so often as we hit the debt limit or the debt ceiling where.
It has to be raised by an act of Congress to a higher level so we can continue to borrow above what the old limit was. And this is much more a political issue than it is an economic issue.
It's all just sort of political drama on both sides of do we raise it or do we don't. If we don't raise debt ceiling than the government can't borrow any more money, they've hit their limit. So that means they have to lower their spending, which could mean that they have to lay people off. They could suspend government payments in terms of unemployment or social security or whatever else they're involved in. This freaks out the market because that changes the status quo. Markets and the economy both like consistency and visibility.
When consistency is threatened or we can't see what might happen next, the markets and everything else freak out. What does a retiree do about something that they literally have no control over other than through the political system, such as it is. How you prepare for this depends upon your financial circumstance.
For the majority of people in retirement who rely on Social Security for paying their bills, I think on average 70 to 80% of their bills are covered by Social Security payments. You are in a precarious situation if those payments are suspended even for a month or two because of debt ceiling drama that's going on.
Now, in theory, once they fix that drama, the payments are started again, and you're reimbursed for the payments missed. But that doesn't help you if you need the money in your account in order to pay your mortgage or to buy food or to pay for healthcare, et cetera.
As much as we're able, we want to immunize ourselves against outside forces, whether that's a bear market or whether that's a debt ceiling drama that can be protracted in terms of having suspended payments. That is one reason why we think a good benchmark to begin with is to build a five-year cushion of having reserves to cover the next five years of your expected spending. Now to get to that five-year number, it's assuming potentially that you're getting your Social Security payment.
If Social Security is suspended, it gives you financial flexibility to manage through the process because you have so much liquidity built into your balance sheet that you can deal with the market turmoil of say, your equity or your other risk assets because they're likely going to go down in this type of drama as it plays out, because you have so much liquidity or runway to be able to survive. Similar to talking about the layoff triage.
That's great if you have enough financial resources in order to do that, but the majority of people don't. So, what do you? Well, similar to the triage that we talked about on a layoff, you can tighten up your budget. You can sell items that you aren't using to try to raise cash.
You can pick up a short-time job. That could be anything with walking dogs to Uber, to whatever you can do to fill the gap, and that sounds easier than it really is depending on your health and your circumstance. You can also look to private charities that have a lot of resources, not just simply in money, but in food banks and other ways to help fill the gap from a services standpoint, the key is you just have to keep working the problem.
You have to be intentional about what can I do next? This really sucks, what can I do next to improve it and just keep working the problem.
Two things you don't want to do.
One is when you're in that type of situation, you don't want to have a wide aperture and look really far down the road, because it's going to be overwhelming and it's going to be intimidating.
During these times of stress, you want to close the aperture and focus on what can I do next? You want to get super tight! What can I do today? What can I do this moment to take some baby step forward, because that's all we're going to have in these type of stressful situations.
The other thing that you don't want. Is you don't want to slack off on taking care of yourself.
Physical exercise, sleep, mental relaxation, anything to get you in a stable state internally, so you have the ability to act intentionally. Because that's usually the first thing to go when we're really under stress. We have to make sure we take care of ourselves first internally so we can show up, not just for our own issues, but you may have a spouse or others that you're trying to serve.
Well, you have to be in a stable spot first in order to help anybody else.
Yeah, the debt ceiling is just a cruel, political drama that doesn't serve either you or me.
With that, let's move on to Bring It On.
BRING IT ON WITH DR. BOBBY DUBOIS
Now it's time to bring it on because you are the hero that you've been looking for. And if you're going to rock retirement, it's going to be a little hard if you are stressed out.
Today, to help us manage stress and think about it a little bit differently, is Dr. Bobby Dubois. Bobby, how are you doing man?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I'm feeling great and not stressed.
Roger: Interestingly, I was waking up, I woke up a little late because I had late night because of some meetups and I was running around the house, not frantically, but I was focused. I had to shave, I had to brush my teeth, I had to get myself centered and I ran upstairs, and I was getting things set up. I was reviewing the outline.
It was a little frantic and I had to sit down. Usually, I have a morning routine and I had to sit down for about four minutes and breathe to help center me so my mind wasn't floating everywhere in order to talk with you. That's a little bit of what we're going to talk about today, right?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It is, and I think you've had a great case in point, which is it only took you a few minutes, but you had to consciously stop yourself and take those few minutes. We'll come to that a little later and we'll have some very tangible techniques that people can try.
Roger: So, let's define some terms, we’re talking about mind body activities and stress.
What do we mean by mind body activities?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Sure. Great question, and you always have to begin by defining terms.
Let me just put this whole category in a little bit of a broader context, which is in the past we've talked about exercise and all the benefits. Nutrition and keeping us healthy from the inside out. Then last month we talked about sleep.
These are all aspects of our life that can improve not only our energy level and our sense of wellbeing, but also our health and longevity. What we're doing today is just another tool in the living long and well toolkit. It's just another technique. It's not like, well, those are hard science, and this is kind of woo woo stuff.
This all fits together, and as folks are probably getting to know about me, I'm very focused on evidence and I wouldn't want to promote things if I didn't feel there was evidence to substantiate it.
Roger: Let me stop you there for a second. That is an important point because all of this, A lot of what we read and hear about stuff like this sounds woo woo, and this is as much science as withdrawal rate studies, this is evidence-based.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Absolutely. And woo woo can be woo woo until it has been scientifically shown to be more than just that. That's what we'll get into a little bit later, the science behind the stress and then these techniques, which some of them have been around thousands of years and they were woo woo for then, but now there's actually data. Clinical studies that show evidence that they work and are worth at least trying.
As folks know, I'm all about trying things and seeing if it helps.
So in terms of defining terms, I'm sure there are really good definitions of mind body activities, but for me it's really pausing and doing something where you're very reflective on what is my body up to, what is my mind up to? It can be meditation, it can be yoga, it can be breath exercises, it can even be a walk in nature, but it's done with intentionality of thinking about what your body's experiencing and what's going on in the mind and visual cortex of what you may be seeing or hearing in your head.
Roger: It reminds me of the word mindfulness, right?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Totally. It could be, I'm going to do five minutes of dishwashing and I'm going to be sensitive to the water on my skin and the plates. That can be exactly a mind body activity. So, it's really about intentionality and focus.
Now the other term to define is stress. It's the dreaded term, but stress really is a biochemical phenomenon. You have a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, one sort of excites you and the other sort of calms you.
So the sympathetic nervous system, which is all controlled through your hypothalamus, which then talks to your pituitary, which then talks to your adrenal glands, and there is tight interconnectivity there, and they release various hormones, adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and that's just a natural part of our evolution.
Now. There's good stress and bad stress. So good stress, you know, in the old days it would help you fight or flight and get away from that tiger that's running after you. There aren't too many tigers running after you.
But nowadays, acute stress, it may be that I'm about to fall and my body quickly goes into action to help me to avoid a fall or avoid a horror coming at me. That is acute stress. It's very beneficial, and we would not do well if we didn't have it.
On the other hand, if that adrenal system in the cortisol and the norepinephrine all those other things, those chemicals are bathing your body all day long due to chronic stress, that's a problem. There's not a lot of benefit to having those hormones circulating all the time.
What we want to do is to both notice it and then figure out what to do, and chronic stress really is when your environment is demanding a lot of you and you're struggling to respond and adapt to it.
Roger: So, stress is a good thing. I think of Aristotle's Golden Mean. If you think of it like a gas meter, stress literally saves our lives in terms of, it helps us grow. It helps us react to dangers that might be coming. That's how it evolved. But too much stress is just these things firing all the time, right?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Right. Whether there's an overt thing bothering you, like I'm living in 110-degree weather every second, I'm being bathed in something that's not comfortable, or whether it's all coming internally.
I'm thinking about the pickleball game, or I'm worried about my kids. That can lead to chronic stress.
Roger: Is it true that the mental stress that we have in our heads, I just lost my income and I'm worried about losing all my money. That these mental constructs of thinking too far in the future from a chemical standpoint can have the same impact as a lion chasing us as far as the excretion of cortisol and things like that?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: You're asking a great question. I can't point to a specific study, but I suspect the acute events, you are having a huge swing in adrenaline and cortisol. Whereas the chronic, it's not going up and down as high, it's just chronically at a level that is not ideal for your wellbeing. Your three-minute, four minute of just pausing earlier, I think turned you from an acute focus on stress, which was good. You had to get those things done to like, okay, now I want to get to a calmer place, and in a couple of minutes you did it.
Roger: Okay. So the chronic stress is like an engine that just constantly runs hot.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly. It's thermos, it's idling speed is too high.
Roger: Okay. When it comes to chronic stress, is that something that's pretty common nowadays?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: You watch television, and everybody says, oh, I'm stressed out. And if you do actual studies, specifically in adults or even older adults, you'll find it's vastly more common than people think. Studies have shown anywhere between 15% and 50% of adults have anxiety symptoms. People say, well, yeah, but it's not that obvious in the elderly or the retiree population.
I think the answer there is that you're not asking the right questions.
Yeah you don't have the work stress because maybe you're retired. But there's a lot of things that people don't ask that are underlying stress, fear of falling or of not having enough money, friends, support systems.
Are you a little bit more irritable and nervous than you like to be? Are you having trouble concentrating? Are there any major life events, loss of a spouse or kids moving to a different city?
There are lots of things that bubble below the surface and want to come up to the surface, and we just have to ask the right questions and we realize it's really quite common.
Roger: All of the ones that you've talked about, obviously fear of money, fear of bear markets, especially early in retirement.
One thing I've observed as people have gotten older, mainly in their seventies and eighties, is fear of their ability to think and act and have agency. My observation is that they're aware that mentally they're not quite as sharp, they need more help with things that they would never have needed help with before, and there's a fear around that.
There's stress around losing agency and needing help.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Absolutely, and that's why in the past we've talked about exercise and keeping your muscles as strong as they can be because if you start to feel uneasy in physical situations, it affects your mental health deeply. You get into this vicious cycle of fear.
I'm not as strong as I used to be. I'm going to fall; I'm going to worry about falling. I can't pick up my grandchild, I can't go traveling the way I'd like and it is a vicious cycle.
Roger: What are some of the things that can trigger chronic stress or how should we self-identify?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, I want to sort of build the scientific case that this is something that we should care about Now, stress, we all know, it makes you feel uneasy, depressed, irritable.
That's pretty obvious. That affects our mental health.
What I want to build is the cases that it also affects our physical health and that it can cause chronic inflammation, which can affect heart disease, cancer, potentially even cognitive decline. It's like, it's okay. I can just say that, but we need studies to say, yeah, that's really true.
So, there's a couple of studies I'll just point to. One was a large study done in Britain of 7,000 people and they basically looked at stress levels and then followed these people forward in time.
The people that had a fair bit of stress in their life had a doubling in their heart attack risk and their risk of dying of heart disease.
Then there was a study with 25,000 people in 52 countries showing it's not just a western world thing, and again, if you follow these people over time, that people who had stress in their lives, chronic stress, had again, a much higher likelihood of a heart attack or dying.
Roger: You had shared that study with me, some of the high levels on the British study. When you say over time, it was like 18 years that they felt?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yes. I mean, they're all different studies with different durations, but this was 18 years, so again, the tigers after me, that's an acute stress. We're looking here at chronic stress and what it does to us.
There's a fascinating study, and it's one of these where it's like ooh, that's where it happens in the brain and ooh, that's what it does to the body. There aren't that many studies that sort of pull it all together.
There's a place in the brain, a tiny little place in the brain in the temporal lobe called the amygdala, and people probably heard about it, and it's where emotions are processed and memory and some decision making.
So there was a really fascinating study where they did brain scans of people. And they found that people whose amygdala’s were firing more than normal, meaning the stress center was in overdrive, had a much higher risk of cardiovascular events three years later, arterial inflammation, which can lead to that heart disease, bone marrow activity that can lead to all sorts of issues.
Now we have a correlation in the brain that says, If your brain is on overdrive in this area, it leads to things years later that are problematic. So it isn't just woo woo, stress isn't just something that makes you feel bad in the moment. It can have health effects and longevity effects. So hopefully people will feel like, hmm, now maybe I should figure out how to do something about it.
Roger: When it comes to chronic stress, obviously worry about bank failures falling down, et cetera. Are there societal things that we can control to manage this? I have my opinions on this, and I'm not a scientist of just chronic poking of our stress responders in terms of 24/7 news or even crime shows 24/7 et cetera.
I would think that those type of things poke at this.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think they really do. And if you look at longevity around the world, and you look at some of these primitive cultures where you focus on physical activity and generally you don't have a lot of chronic stress, it's mostly about that tiger that in fact is running after you.
Many of these people have far lower incidences of heart disease and other chronic illnesses. We're not laboratory rats, so it's hard to disentangle how much of that is your phone pinging you all day long versus the shows you watch on television or you don't watch on television to the food we eat. The lack of exercise that we get.
It's hard to disentangle, but I'm with you. There's a lot in our societal milieu that just amps up chronic stress.
Roger: Now we're going to switch to what are mind body activities and some things that we can do to test, right?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly.
Roger: Before we do this, I want to have a disclaimer, and that is there's going to be a lot of people listening that when they hear yoga, meditation, it's going to be something that's very foreign and "woo woo" to them in terms of, I can't imagine myself doing this.
I want to challenge you to have an open mind and you don't have to wear robes around the house to do yoga or meditate. This could be a momentary thing that you do on the tractor or in the car or on the golf course. I just want to have this disclaimer to say, just listen. Give it a little bit of a try. It can take two seconds because not everybody is someone that practices this stuff or thinks about it.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, I think that is a wonderful way to introduce it.
There'll be two of these four that I hope people will be like, oh yeah, that's easy to do. Don't have to get my robe or my meditation cushion, I can just try it out.
So, the first, they're sort of the four I want to walk. One is sort of walking in nature, the next is breath exercises, meditation, and yoga. Now there's a lot of others. There's Qigong and a variety of other things, and as I said, you can wash your dishes in a very mindful way and that can be very, very nurturing and recentering.
But let's talk about some science that supports this. A really interesting study, they were looking at the amygdala, our old friend, the emotion decision making, memory and stress center.
In the laboratory they ran a group of people through a test. Angry faces, they showed them pictures of angry faces or difficult tasks, mental tasks, something to create stress, and they did a scan of the brain to see kind of, was the amygdala lighting up and how much in this sort of pseudo stress situation.
Then they divided the group in two. One group went for a walk around town and the other one went for a walk in a park among nature where it was very quiet.
Remarkably, the group that went for a walk in nature had far less activation of that part of the brain center associated with sort of the test of anxiety than the one that walked around town.
This is something anybody can do. Just go for a walk, go for 10 minute walk where it's quiet and it's beautiful and it's nature. As opposed to walking the dog where your neighbors will say hello every two seconds. That's a very simple one. That's a mind body activity and it's not very woo woo, and there's science to support it.
So, I love this kind of thing.
Roger: What's the second one?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Let's do another non woo woo one, and that is breath work. Now people think, oh, well I heard in yoga you do this heavy rapid-fire breathing. Nah, we don't have to do that.
There are different breath exercises, and this only takes like 3, 4, 5 minutes. It's not a big deal and it really, really makes a difference.
There's a wonderful neuroscientist at Stanford, Andrew Huberman, and he has a podcast on all sorts of mind body related things, but he has one on how to breathe and he talks about four different sorts of breath techniques you can practice with. Box breathing and hyperventilation and various other things, but the one that turned out in a study to be most impactful, five minutes of this exercise, once a day for a month. They showed reductions in heart rate and heart rate variability and respiratory rate and greater wellbeing. It's a very simple one. So one I like to do every day, and it's called sort of emphasized exhaling.
So, basically what you do is you take a breath before you let it out, you take another breath to sort of top yourself off, and you do that through your nose and then you exhale in a very conscious way through your mouth. So, it's very simple. Something like this. Pause about five, ten seconds. Do it again. Don't do it fast, because otherwise you'll get too lightheaded and in five minutes your brain will be in a different place. Not a lot of woo woo. It's really easy to do and I've gotten lots of people to try it.
There's this video that I think we can put in the 6-Shot Saturday that we'll link to and try it out.
Roger: That's a simple thing you can do in your car. I do things like that before I do a podcast or before I walk into a party or some place to just sort of center myself. And I actually combine that with this structure called Whoop, which I've talked about.
Which is, let's say I'm going into a party, okay? First, it's the what? I'm going into a party. My objective is, I want to be present. For the people around me, the obstacles are, there's going to be a lot of noise and it's just going to be a lot of input. The plan is to focus on one person at a time. I do that coupled with breathing, and you could do that before you go into a meeting, before you go to the doctor, before you have a difficult conversation, just to sort of center yourself.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It's very powerful, and as I mentioned physiologically, it shows changes.
Now, and obviously I want to sort of finish off with the two that we alluded to. One is meditation, mindfulness meditation, and I don't need to go through how do you do or what do you do, there's a million things on the web to help you.
But a study that was done looked at a bunch of people who went on a meditation retreat, but I don't think you have to do a meditation retreat, and there was a 20% drop in cortisol after a couple of days. I mean, that's real and that's important.
In a yoga study, there were 49 clinical studies where people did a few yoga sessions per week for a couple of months, and their blood pressure dropped, both their systolic and their diastolic blood pressure.
So yes, as I said earlier, there may be thousands of years of wounds around mindfulness, meditation and yoga, but there's recently MRI evidence and blood pressure evidence and cortisol evidence that it can and does help.
Roger: Where the rubber meets the road on this is we want to have better energy. These things have been proven to help center ourselves and lower chronic stress. So why wouldn't you try something?
How do we go about that?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: People are probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but what we want to do is basically test on ourselves.
We need a baseline, kind of where are we at now? Then try something, wait a few weeks. This isn't something that happens necessarily in one day.
Then reassess where you're at and figure out whether it helped or it didn't help.
So you can just do it on a scale of one to ten, how stressed out I feel on a daily basis, and put that on your calendar and try something and come back. There's also a lot of questionnaires you can find on the web. One is called the Perceived Stress Score, PSS.
Again, we'll hopefully have a link for you guys to go to and it's a series of questions and you scale it, score it. You get a number and then try one of these activities. You could try them all at once just for the heck of it, but you might try just one of them for a couple of weeks, do your nature walk or do breath work or whatever, and then come back a couple of weeks later and do the test again in terms of where your stress level is.
There's four of these. You can try all four of them over time, and if none of 'them work well, you've done your best, you've tried, but I would not be surprised if some of these really do help. Then you feel better and your blood pressure's lower, your cortisol levels are lower, there is less likelihood of heart disease, inflammation, and all sorts of other chronic illnesses that I think we would all like to avoid.
Roger: Can I offer a non-scientific test?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Please do.
Roger: Just do it once today and just check yourself afterwards. Do it twice today. So what are we going to talk about next month, Mr. Scientist?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think we're going to take a plunge into something hot and something cold, and that's not sweet and sour chicken. That's the evidence around heat, sauna, and cold whether it's a cold shower, cold plunge or something like that.
So that's where I think we'll go. It's about as far from woo woo as you could get. It really does something to your body and there's evidence to show it really benefits us.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
On your marks, get set.
Roger: and we're off to set a little baby step that we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.
All right, in the next seven days, I challenge you to do some basic triage. Update your net worth. Look at your liquidity. Calculate if you didn't have any income, how long could you sustain your life using just simply the liquid reserves that you have.
An easy way to do that is you take your monthly spending, let's assume it's $10,000 a month, and let's assume you have a hundred thousand dollars in cash reserves. Just as an example. Divide your spending into your cash reserves, 100,000 divided by 10,000. You have 10 months of liquidity until you run out of cash, numbers will be different for you. But just do a little bit of basic triage, even if you're not in a risky situation.
So, you can say, okay, I got some runway, or hmm, I, maybe I need to tweak this a little bit.
ROCK RETIREMENT PLEDGE
One way to be intentional in your life is to reset yourself literally every single day. So as an example, when I am recording this show, and this is a practice I instilled just recently related to the show, is the first thing I do. Is I reread the pledge that I wrote, and then I actually have it in the form of a mind map to center myself on what I am doing here and what I intend to do in chatting with you.
Number one, I want to focus on you and your journey. This isn't about me or anybody else. This is about you and your journey. In transitioning into and rocking retirement, I want to focus on that.
I want to focus on you building hope, having an inspiring goal, identifying your agency, your ability to take action, and then helping you figure out how to find pathways.
I want to do this in an authentic way with no pretense. I want to be humble and make lots of mistakes. I want to admit those mistakes, and I want to be respectful for you and where you're on your journey.
I want to be curious. I want to hold my beliefs up for fresh examination to either affirm them or amend them. I want to approach everything with fresh eyes so we can continue to learn.
I want to do this for you, being free from big finance and all the vested interests of products and things that taint a lot of the advice that we hear. I don't want to talk about products for money. I don't want to be gimmicky with you and I want to focus on you taking action, little baby steps because that's how you create a great life so you can expand your perspective and I am all in on doing this.
So, let's go do this.
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references are historical and do not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.