Getting heart healthy: The missing ingredient | James Beckerman | TEDxPeachtree

What if the best way to help yourself was by helping someone else? I became a cardiologist because I wanted to help people with heart disease. But after just a few years in practice, I was getting really frustrated. Even though 80% of heart attacks can be prevented by making healthier decisions, I felt like I couldn't even get my own patients to take my recommendations to heart. Back then, I thought that making healthy lifestyle choices was pretty straightforward. All you needed was a little motivation and the right information. So I decided that I would come up with the perfect prescription to help. I figured that if I could inspire people and craft the right message, then I could change people's choices for them. I could be the self in their self-help. So I took the first bold step forward toward becoming a self-help guru. I created a Twitter account and then I wrote a book. I really did believe in the power and potential for self-help, but I'm embarrassed to say that I also really believed in myself. My own unique ability to inspire that willpower and craft that perfectly oversimplified message for anyone who would listen or click, follow, retweet, or buy. I'll never forget the strange mix of pride and self-consciousness I felt when I walked into Barnes & Noble and saw it there in the bookshelf for the first time. My lifestyle guide to heart health that I earnestly wrote on my laptop at the kitchen table was now just another diet book with a bright yellow cover and the tagline promise 200 ways to lose 20 pounds. Within weeks, I was explaining the miracle of cooking spray to Al Roker as Kathy Lee and Hoda ran their fingers through my hair on national television. I taste tested vegetable soup with Dr. Oz. I traveled to Wisconsin to speak at a wellness carnival really and I was the opening act for the tooth fairy. This was self-help on steroids and I realize now that I didn't believe a word of it even though I had written over 65,000 of them. Do any of us really believe it? You really think motivation and information are the answers? People are more motivated than ever before. The success of the self-help industry tells that to us. We're more well-informed than ever before but we keep looking for solutions in the same old way. A self-obsessed self-help industry that reflects exactly what you're looking at in the mirror. It makes you buy that book and watch that infomercial and click on that app. It makes you focus on just yourself and I think we can all agree that it isn't really helping. It may sell us distractions in the form of bright yellow covers and tagline promises but it ultimately just isolates us. Several months went by after the book came out and as you may be guessing it eventually slipped off the bookshelves into Amazon oblivion. Turns out I wasn't much of a self-help guru after all. But I was still a doctor and I continue to believe in my heart that people can change. That my patients can live healthier lives and take advantage of that 80% opportunity to prevent heart disease. Despite my own disillusionment with the industry and my own role within it, I still believed in self-help. But rather than focus so much on the self, I started to wonder what would happen if we focused instead on the health. What if the most direct path toward helping yourself was helping other people achieve their goal? Rather than fill a prescription in isolation, what if we all joined a team and healed ourselves together? So we created a team, a free walking and running community. We call ourselves Heart to Start and rather than focus on speed or distance, we train intentionally to be inclusive and emphasize vulnerability and friendship on and off the track. We ask our athletes to celebrate the journeys of their teammates even as they make their own way. Research shows that when you contribute to a team or are active in any community, your participation reinforces your own value as one of its members. When we invest in supporting our teammates, they're investing in us too. And when you recognize your value, your decisions start to matter. Self-worth amplifies the impact of the choices you make. So without even realizing it and without buying a book or watching an infomercial or downloading an app, you can really start to change. So by creating this community of helpers, we were becoming better selves. Heart to Start is now celebrating its sixth season. We've expanded to four other cities and brought together hundreds of amazing teammates with really incredible journey. Chris lost over 110 pounds without my book. But by working hard, attending weekly workouts and more importantly, spending quality time with their teammates afterwards. Tracy was so nervous to exercise around other people, but with her team at her back, she's now an ultra marathoner and our newest coach. Russell began his journey after a diagnosis of congestive heart failure, just a few steps at a time. But with the support of his team and his family, he recently celebrated his recovery by climbing to the top of Mount Fuji. Katie didn't need to climb a mountain. She wanted to be a grandma who could get down on the carpet and play with her grandkids. She can do that now and she can shake them around too. So many of us were accustomed to this idea that we needed to travel our own journey alone. Not anymore. None of us needs to. So even as we were becoming better selves, I started to think about who else could we be helping? Maybe by connecting our team with my patients in some way, we can incorporate this model of self-help into delivering health care. But how? As a caregiver, how would you share your compassion with the underclinic? As a patient, can you really fill a prescription for community? As a healthcare system, how can we infect people with value and self-worth? Instead of spending our energy on retweets and follows and satisfaction surveys and sales rankings, what if we turned the self-help industry on its head and invested instead in a healthcare system, not just a team, that heals it forward? In healthcare, when you share your time and your resources, your knowledge and strategy to make someone else's world a better place, that's the very heart of prevention. And that's also the heart of being a volunteer. What if we put the two together? Could volunteering help prevent heart disease? We've known for a long time that people who are charitable with their time improve their social connectedness. 70% of people with depression who volunteer improve their symptoms. But research is also showing that volunteering is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and even mortality, independent of risk factors, socioeconomic status, age, or gender. Communities with double the rate of volunteerism experience a lower incidence of heart disease and death by one third. Giving your time gives you more time. But why? Why would being charitable make us healthier? Could volunteering improve your own healthcare? I like to think of charity as a natural remedy because it's a reflection of our own vulnerability. It breaks down the barriers that illness can create around us and it allows us to live the empathy that we seek from others. Illness can isolate us. I believe that the self-help industry can also isolate us. Charity connects us. Volunteering is also associated with an increased sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. The word charity is actually derived from the Latin caritas which can be translated into esteem. Self-esteem makes us feel that we deserve this wonderful life and self-efficacy convinces us that we're also capable of achieving it. Did you know that charity is actually a renewable resource? The more you give, the more you get. The more you volunteer, the more you can change. And the beautiful part is that you then have more to give. Whether it's time or kindness or just being there for someone else. That's how Heart to Start began to change. By adding action to our activity, by moving beyond self-help toward helping other selves. Last year, we started mixing weekly workouts with opportunities to heal it forward at the food bank and at the Humane Society. This year, we're expanding the model to our free heart screenings for kids. We're collecting cans of food to give to the hungry. We're teaching art classes in our waiting room and accepting donations to place defibrillators back into our community. Our patients are now volunteering to support one another on their paths through treatment and recovery. And when you're helping each other as a team, everyone's a climber, but everyone's also a guide. We're learning that doing good makes you feel better. Can you imagine all the untapped opportunities we have to help one another and feel better together? What would healthcare feel like if your doctor's office invited you to bring a can of food or a toy to your next appointment and shared it with another family in the clinic who needed it more? What could we accomplish with support groups if instead of meeting in some basement in a hospital, we planted gardens or built houses or constructed soccer fields or read to kids? What if your own doctor prescribed community service and filled the prescription by your side? Teamwork changed the way that I believe in self-help, but charity is changing the way that I believe in healthcare. Let's find more ways to get better together by doing good together. If you do, yourself will find help, but where you least expected it. Not in a book, not in an infomercial, not in an app, and definitely not in a movie. But as part of a team, let's give it a go. Thank you so much. Thank you.