By Samantha Renfro
Time and time again you hear people preach the benefits of forming healthy habits. But what does this actually look like, and how can it positively impact our health? Conscious Medicine expert and Chief Medical Officer at Wild Health, Dr. Mike Stone reveals habits everyone should incorporate—and how they’ve transformed his life.
Take a moment to consider what your day-to-day life looks like. Maybe you wake up an hour early every morning to spend some time journaling before work, or you dedicate each Sunday to meal prep, creating nutritious and protein-based meals to get you through the week.
Or, maybe you stay up late every night and wake up with less than 7 hours of sleep, choose Uber to commute to work versus riding your bike (even on a sunny day), and spend the weekend excessively drinking and eating foods that don’t fuel your body.
If you relate more to the latter example of behaviors, you’re not as alone as you may feel. According to America’s Health Rankings, approximately 36% of American adults report one unhealthy behavior, 23.9% report two, and 12% report having multiple.
The question remains, how can people shift out of these “bad habits”?
Dr. Mike Stone knows this all too well. He sat down with us to share his story and how he’s now helping others step into a health-centered lifestyle with simple yet effective changes.
While working in the emergency department, Dr. Stone found himself overworked and unable to dedicate enough time to his personal life, resulting in him forming unhealthy habits. He was “overweight, not doing any real exercise, not eating well, working an emergency department schedule where I was sleep deprived,” he shares, and overall, was more focused on professional achievement than a healthy work-life balance.
Yet, that all changed when Dr. Stone made the career switch from impersonal care to a holistic approach with Conscious Medicine.
“Everything from nutrition to sleep and meditation to breath work completely transformed my life and the skill set that I have,” he says. Today, he lives his life by five essential habits: sleep, physical activity, nutrition, emotional and spiritual health, and community connection.
“I get up early, I’ll drink coffee, and then I’ll sit outside for 15 minutes, maybe focus on my breathing, sit quietly, enjoy my coffee, and on an A+ day, I’ll journal a bit about ‘This is what I want to get out of the day’ or ‘This is what I really loved about yesterday’”.
As a precision medicine practitioner, Dr. Stone is dedicated to tailoring a healthcare plan for each patient that is not population-based but targeted to the specific individual.
“In terms of the standard healthcare model in the Western world, it’s not a precision medicine model, it’s a one-size-fits-all model. But the type of medicine that I practice is informed by the patient’s goals, their genetics, their epigenome, what’s actually expressing itself with their genetics right now, their specific nutritional predilections in terms of what may work, and may not, but also what they want to eat.”
Dr. Stone emphasizes the importance of forming habits that you truly enjoy, for instance, if you’re going to implement a new diet, you’ll likely stick to it if you actually like what you’re eating.
“It’s really tailoring a holistic plan around sleep, nutrition, training, connection, contemplative practice, stress, and resiliency, all based on an individual’s preferences and characteristics. I don’t ever have the same plan for two patients. The plan is always going to change depending on who I’m working with, and that’s my approach to medicine.”
It also blends into what Dr. Stone applies to conscious medicine, a healthcare model that focuses on connection and communication with the patient, listening to what they have to say, and having their best interests in mind.
“The way I do it is through a very holistic approach which includes nutrition, sleep, social connection, joy, contemplative practice, stress, resiliency, physical training, community, and connection. All of these elements are equally and vitally important,” he explains. These are all healthy habits Dr. Stone believes everyone should consider prioritizing to foster optimal health.
“We also focus on allostasis, which is the concept of adding a deliberate challenging stimulus and then recovering from that stimulus appropriately so you can handle more challenges in the future and be stronger across whatever metric you’re evaluating.”
Today, Dr. Stone practices Conscious Medicine, which blends concierge care with his precision approach and is planning patient retreats to get everyone together to do things like hiking with weighted backpacks, going to the sauna, dipping in a cold plunge, eating healthy food, doing breathwork, and contemplative practices throughout a weekend. “That’s something that just doesn’t exist in healthcare,” he says—all habits he now implements into his life.
Many in the longevity and anti-aging communities view health through a fear and scarcity lens, creating anxiety about what you need to be doing today in order to live a long and healthy life. “I take a very different approach,” he says. “We want to enjoy every moment of the gift that we’ve been given to be here. If we’re working on these practices, everything naturally falls in place.”
At the end of the day, Dr. Stone preaches the importance of “leaning in directly to what we know makes you the healthiest right now, but also focusing on getting the most joy out of the present moment and not missing it because we’re too busy planning for tomorrow.”
Learn more about Dr. Mike Stone and his approach to Conscious Medicine, and follow him on Instagram.