Speaker 1: 0:06

As Stevie Wonder says, good morning or evening, friends, here's your friendly announcer and I have serious news to pass on to everybody. Hey, beautiful souls, welcome Welcome to the sweet spot. It is self-care Saturday and, as you can tell, I'm listening to music this Saturday, and I hope you will too. We're going to be discussing the topic we've been talking about all week, which is love, be love. That's our topic. Be love, not wait to be loved, not chase love, not earn love, not look for love, but choose love, receive love and walk in love. Because, beautiful souls, the love you choose, especially for yourself, is the most radical restorative force you've got. And this is Self-Care Saturday.

Speaker 1: 1:02

I'm Dr Derek Sweet, board-certified psychiatrist, specializing in high performance and, more than that, your partner, your partner on the journey, on the journey to love. I just thought I'd have to say that to you one more time. So let's talk about the brain. We haven't discussed how the brain responds to love all week long. I've given you a break on it because I know we drill in the neuroscience here pretty hard on the sweet spot. But there is a neurochemistry to love, something that your brain does when you are walking in love, when you choose love, when you are being love. When you choose love, my friend, whether that's giving it, receiving it or just being still in it, your nervous system shifts. There are chemicals in your brain that actually secrete out into your neural system and gives you all kinds of blessings, and I want to tell you about a couple of them. One of them is dopamine. You're familiar with dopamine. Dopamine is the reward chemical, the one that kicks in when you're motivated and when your mood is good. Yes, when you walk in love, you get the benefit of dopamine being secreted all through your brain. What a wonderful neurotransmitter to have flowing in you, don't you want that? Another one is oxytocin. You may not have heard that one, or maybe you have. It's called the bonding hormone, the love hormone, oxytocin, and, interestingly, oxytocin is both neurotransmitters, something that's secreted in the brain, and it also has effects in the body, which makes it both a hormone and the neurotransmitter. And so when you are flowing in love, my friend, you're getting the benefit not only of dopamine, but oxytocin flowing all through your body. Unless you think oxytocin is only about love and feeling good. It is great about mood, but it's also great about helping your blood pressure lower. It's also an antioxidant in many ways. It stops the inflammation in the body. It helps your blood pressure, your heart rate. It connects to your parasympathetic nervous system. It does a lot. So you want this mixture of dopamine and oxytocin flowing when you are giving love, receiving love or being still in love.

Speaker 1: 3:28

And there's more. In the neuroscience there are endorphins You've heard of this, those of you who are into like exercise and all of that the endorphins and the enkephins. These are natural pain relievers. They actually help you not feel pain as much. They also get secreted when you are moving in love. And what's? The stress hormone? Cortisol. All right, so that's in the body as well. When we're stressed out, our cortisol levels are high. And when the brain starts making these shifts, guess what happens? The body secretes less cortisol, the stress hormone drops and guess what? Your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops, your body enters a state of calm power. So love isn't just a vibe, it's a biological healing code, absolutely. And it's super important that you grasp that and that you get it and that you take full advantage of doing something you love or being somewhere you love or being with someone you love. Somehow find a way to connect to love.

Speaker 1: 4:40

This morning I just played some Stevie Wonder and I gotta tell you it really helped me and I was thinking about the stress we have in the world today. You know you turn on the TV and it's easy to fall out of love with what you see. You can see evidence where love is not being shared in the world. And the song that I heard from Stevie Wonder I quoted it at the very beginning Love's in Need of Love Today. It's a beautiful song. I started our talk today with that and I mentioned Love's in Need of Love Today.

Speaker 1: 5:14

But there's a second verse in that song that's super, super important for me to share with you, because it just reminded me of the power, the raw power, of love and what's happening in our world today, why love is so in need of love itself. The second verse of that song says this "'The force of evil plans to make you its possession "'and it will, if we let it, destroy everybody "'We all must take precautionary measures. If love and peace you treasure, then you'll hear me when I say, oh, that love is in need of love today. Don't delay, send yours in right away, because hate's going round, it's breaking many hearts. Stop it, please, before it's gone too far, people, don't? You know that love is in need of love today. Don't delay.

Speaker 1: 6:16

And you know, when I heard that beautiful souls, when I heard that it reminded me that this is the issue, the deep issue with our world today that love, love itself is in need of love. And hey, I know you're a loving person. Sometimes you is in need of love and hey, I know you're a loving person, sometimes you're in need of love, sometimes you, being love, is in need of love. So love is in need of love today. Don't delay in giving yourself some love today, pouring some love back into you. It's self-care Saturday and we're just flowing today. Today there's no real into you. It's self-care Saturday and we're just flowing today. Today there's no real big agenda. I just want you to understand that when you are moving in love, when you're loving yourself, when you take the time to go sit on the back porch or you take the time to listen to some music, you take the time to take a deep breath. Just while we do one right now, do a nice deep breath. It may be the only deep breath you take today and then you let it out. You know what you're doing. You're recentering your entire nervous system. You're sending the message that I love me enough that I took a minute out to do some deep breathing, and that love is in need of that love today is in need of that love today.

Speaker 1: 7:33

And the good news about love real love is that you don't have to dress up to get that. You don't have to pretend to be something in order to get it. Whenever you find that you're working hard to get love. That's not love. Love is unconditional. Love is a beautiful, unconditional gift, a gift from above. You know, kendrick Lamar has a song on love and in that song there's a line if I didn't ride blade on curb, would you still love me? If I didn't ride blade on curb, would you still love me? Meaning translation love isn't about conditions. It's about consistency and constancy. It's about being loving, even if I'm riding in a fancy car or if I'm dressed beautifully or not dressed beautifully, loving me and loving yourself with your flaws, it doesn't matter. You don't have to ride blade on curb to get love. That's the beauty of it.

Speaker 1: 8:33

That love is unconditional and in nature, nature confirms this. Nature loves us every single day unconditionally, doesn't it? The sun rises every morning without asking for any applause, and it doesn't get mad at you for seeing nothing to it. It doesn't say oh man, I rise every morning, I'm giving you warmth, I'm warming the plants, I'm warming the planet, and nobody says thank you. The sun is not like that Trees. They offer us oxygen without demanding our loyalty. The trees don't want you to be loyal in order to go through photosynthesis and get us oxygen. And all that? No, the ocean returns in waves. Think about that. It goes out and comes back in waves, faithful, powerful and free.

Speaker 1: 9:26

Yeah, morning by morning, the ancient wisdom says new mercies, new opportunities appear, and when the moon shows up, even in her phases, she reminds you that you can be incomplete and still luminous. You can still have this sheen about you. Even if you're not shining as brightly as the sun, you might have the luminescence of the moon in you today, yeah, yeah, because when you walk in love, you're walking in a divine power. Right In the ancient wisdom they put it this way Love God, love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and then love your neighbor as you love yourself. So why did the ancients put these two things together? Right, loving God with your heart, mind, body, soul, strength, and then loving your neighbor as yourself.

Speaker 1: 10:22

Because, my friend, it's all about being holistic. That's holistic love when your heart's involved, when your soul's involved, when your mind is involved, when your body's involved, when you are completely in love with what you're doing, with the one that you're with even if that one is you okay you are really being blessed by the power of love, because love doesn't put conditions on you. Love is not going to put those kind of sticky demands on you. Love is not going to have you contort to be something that you're not in order to be around it. As I said to you, nature shows us how love just rains on the rich and the poor. The sun shines on everyone equally.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Oxygen is available to everyone, and Shakespeare wrote this with raw brilliance in Sonnet 116, when he says Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Love is not love when it alters, when it alteration finds. You know what that means that real love doesn't bounce when you change, grow, break or rebuild. It stays, it holds, it believes. If it finds an alteration, it's not going to try to alter it. That's not what love does. Love is acceptance, love is patient, love is kind, love is not keeping a record of wrong.

Speaker 1: 11:58

We talked about this right in the previous episodes, but it's amazing how consistent love is. It's a quiet gangster. It doesn't change. Love is. It's a quiet gangster. It doesn't change. It's not backing down. It's gonna flex in the face of darkness. It's gonna provide more light. Yeah, and listen, life is hard. That's why love has to be a quiet gangster. There's loss, there's grief, there's rejection, there's stress, there are problems financial problems, health problems, relationship problems, life problems. They'll knock at the door. They will try to rob you of the stuff that you need, and that's why your quiet, gangster love has to be on your side. Amen, I would put an amen right there too.

Speaker 1: 12:57

And the thing about it is that in life sometimes you can feel alone. That's another trick. I call it the trick of the devil, that's my way of saying it that the world will try to isolate you For everything that's around you. It'll try to make you feel like, my God, you're just alone, nothing's working out for you, and that you're just so alone. But here's the truth when you're walking in love, right, you're never truly alone. If you love the one you're with, and the one you're always with is you. So you got to start with there, right there, loving you, because self-love is not about ego, it's about endurance. You've got to have it, Because when you refuse to reject this notion that you always have to have somebody around you or that you always have to be in the mix or getting attention, you become emotionally dependent.

Speaker 1: 13:59

And when you refuse to reject yourself, you become emotionally unshakable. I'll say it again when you refuse to reject yourself in any situation, you become emotionally unshakable. Remember we did an unshakable series about a week or two ago. I want you to go back and check it out. We did a whole week on the unshakable you. You know the unshakable you and I don't know if we said it enough in that series. The unshakable you is the love, the love of God, that is anchored in you, the quiet gangster that's called love. That's in you. So today, I want you to affirm with me these sayings Take another deep breath, nice, deep breath in hold and then out.

Speaker 1: 14:55

Nice, deep breath in and out. That's when you reset yourself for love. When we work with athletes and high-level performers, we teach breathing. We teach that when you take a deep breath, you're coming back into this moment. This is something you can control, is this moment and you reset yourself. And I just ask you to take that deep breath, to bring all that rich oxygen, that loving oxygen, into your loved body and let it lovingly flow into all of your tissues and into your cells and into your biochemical processes, into your electron transport chain, all that stuff that we learn in biology and biochemistry, and let that love biochemistry be amplified through the fact that you're taking the time to bring air into your body in a loving way. The time to bring air into your body in a loving way. You would be surprised, my friend, of how taking a few minutes to have deep breaths could be one of the most loving things you do for your mind, body and spirit.

Speaker 1: 16:07

And when you do these deep breaths, what we usually pair them with in sport and in high performance is with affirmations. An affirmation here's an affirmation I choose to be loved. Let that sink in. Here's another I choose to love myself fully. Let that sink in. And here's another one I receive the love nature and spirit already offer me. My body heals in the presence of love. I am not alone. I am never alone. I am in love with the one who loves me, which is God Today. I will be loved. So those are some affirmations that you can say anytime you can look in the mirror, and one of my favorites that I ask so many of the folks I work with to do and sometimes it's really hard to do this is when you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror and you say Joe, I love you. Now I'm using Joe, but use your name, okay.

Speaker 1: 17:40

It's important to say I love you and say it 10, 12 times as you look yourself in the mirror. Dorothy, I love you, john, I love you, charles, I love you, kia, I love you, whatever your name is. You say it out loud and you say I love you. You know why that's important? Because you're sending a message to your mind, body, spirit and soul and you're setting the tone for the day that you already have love. You're filling your cup. You're filling your cup so that you can give this love to others. It's got to start with you. Remember, in the ancient wisdom, you've got to love your neighbor as you love yourself. So it's a practice, just like you would practice going to the gym and practice your piano, or practice your guitar, or practice your moves if you're a dancer or if you're a boxer, you're always practicing your sets, practice loving yourself too, in the mornings, and that's when you look in the mirror and you say these things.

Speaker 1: 18:49

This is your moment to love the one who's been carrying you all along, not just as a thought, but as a practice. So slow down today. It's Self-Care Saturday. Take a walk with you, breathe deeply with you, put your hand on your heart and say I got you, I got you. Look up to the sky and let the Most High know that you get, that he gets you. Amen. Because when you choose to be loved, you don't just survive in this life, you rise in it.

Speaker 1: 19:30

All right now. This is Dr Sweet. Thank you so much for listening to me on this self-care Saturday. I hope that you go get that Stevie Wonder album that I mentioned, that song Love's in Need of Love today, and that you would listen to it. Or maybe Kendrick Lamar's song Love, and just remember that love is in need of love today. Don't delay, send yours in right away. All right now, dr Sweet, signing out. I'll see you tomorrow, for you know it. Slow Down Sunday. And you know we get astrophysical when we get into Sunday. We take it to the cosmos, we take it up, up, up. All right, I'll see you tomorrow. Don't be late. And if you know somebody who could use some self-care Saturday, messaging around the power of love, choosing love and being loved, please share this and I'll see you tomorrow. Love and blessings.