Hungry For More: What Our Cravings Reveal About Leadership and Well-Being, Dr. Adrienne Youdim
What if the key to better leadership wasn't about working harder, but about understanding a deeper, often ignored, inner hunger? What if the stress, reactivity, and burnout so common in leadership are actually symptoms of a spiritual and emotional famine?
In this episode of Spirituality in Leadership, host Andrew Cohn sits down with Dr. Adrienne Youdim, a weight loss physician and mind-body medicine practitioner, to explore the concept of "inner hunger." Dr. Adrienne argues that beneath the surface of our busy lives and professional ambitions lies a universal hunger for validation, autonomy, respite, and self-compassion. When left unmet, we try to feed these hungers with distractions like overworking, people-pleasing, or perfectionism, leading to a cycle of stress and disconnection.
Drawing from her new book, Hungry for More, and her own journey from a high-achieving "white coat" physician to a holistic practitioner, Dr. Adrienne makes a compelling case that leadership requires a foundational practice of self-awareness and self-care. She shares powerful, practical tools—from conscious breathing to body scanning—that literally change our physiology, quiet the noise, and allow us to access the "deep down" wisdom we all possess.
This episode is an invitation to pause, recognize your own hungers, and learn how feeding them is not self-indulgent, but essential for clear-headed, intentional, and sustainable leadership
Key Takeaways
The Second Hunger
Beyond physical cravings lies an emotional and spiritual hunger, unmet needs that drive behavior and often lead us away from what we value.Hunger as a Messenger
Adrienne encourages leaning in to hunger as information, a signal pointing toward what is missing or neglected.Agency as a Spiritual Practice
Personal agency, the ability to direct one’s life, is closely linked to spirituality because it anchors empowerment and meaning.The Power of the Pause
Breathing, walking, journaling, and stillness help create space between trigger and reaction, a key to accessing inner wisdom.The Physiology of Stress
Chronic stress shuts down clear thinking and creativity. Simple practices like breathwork or body relaxation directly reset the nervous system.Universal Hunger
After thousands of patient encounters, Adrienne observed that inner hunger is universal across age, profession, culture, and status.Creating Time for What You Value
Time for well-being is not found. It is created. Personal health directly supports professional and relational health.
In This Episode:
[00:01] Introduction to emotional and spiritual hunger
[04:21] Dr. Youdim’s background and upbringing
[06:07] Agency, empowerment, and spirituality
[09:21] Understanding and redirecting hunger
[10:08] Types of hunger and neglecting needs
[12:07] Spiritual hunger defined
[14:53] Practical barriers to stillness
[18:54] Tactics for accessing stillness
[20:57] Breathing and physiological regulation
[24:28] Stress response and leadership function
[28:17] Guided relaxation and body awareness
[32:55] Personal story: perfectionism and achievement
[36:56] Integrating science, experience, and spirituality
[39:19] Time, value, and well-being
[41:05] Teachable moments and external triggers
[43:25] Conclusion and resources
Resources and Links
Spirituality in Leadership Podcast
Dr. Adrienne Youdim
Email: dr@dradrienneyoudim.com
Book: Hungry for More: Stories and Science to Inspire Weight Loss from the Inside Out
TEDx Talk: Your Hunger is the Key to Understanding Your Unmet Needs
Andrew Cohn
Music:
Watch our Podcast episode
Transcript
Adrienne Youdim: I recognized that there was an emotional hunger, a spiritual hunger. I always say there's another hunger in the room if left unmet, doesn't get to the root of what is being brought up for the individual.
Andrew Cohn: I hear it's about understanding and redirecting and feeding it in a healthy way, if I could use that verb.
Adrienne Youdim: 100% Andrew, I talk about leaning into that hunger. And oftentimes these hungers there are vulnerabilities. If we can change our view of this hunger and say, I wonder what this is trying to tell me, call my attention to what might be missing in my life, what might I not be paying attention to? Perhaps it's a hunger for validation. Maybe it's a hunger for perfection. What underlies that hunger?
Andrew Cohn: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn. Spirituality in Leadership is a platform for conversations with leaders at all levels about bringing our spiritual dimensions to our leadership, our teams, our workplaces, and all areas of our lives in order to achieve greater success and fulfillment and build and sustain healthier organizations. If you'd like to connect with me to talk further about these topics and or about individual or team coaching, leadership workshops, or team alignment, please go to my website lighthouseteams.com. Enjoy the podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, I'm so pleased to speak with Dr. Adrienne Youdim. She is a weight loss physician based in Los Angeles and also a mind body medicine practitioner who supports people in a variety of ways. She is an author. Her book is called Hungry for More: Stories and Science to Inspire Weight Loss From the Inside Out. She also has a TED Talk and she talks about this concept of inner hunger, which sometimes is a prompt from her practice where people come to see her as a weight loss physician, but even more broadly within each of us what is it that we're hungering for? What does that trigger in terms of our own behavior? Is it healthy for us? Is it not healthy for us? And she talks about the impact of consistently neglecting our own needs, our unmet needs, those needs that drive this hunger. When we neglect our needs in service of something else, even if that something else is something positive, it's not sustainable. It doesn't support us. And her work offers tools to help people pause, reflect to access what we were talking about in the conversation as the deep down. Because she says deep down we know what we want, we know what we need. How do we access it? So she's a wonderful resource, very, very practical. I appreciate the way she shares her own personal experience and personal story. I invite you to listen, to learn, to consider, not to mention to reflect on some of the inquiry that she presents to us in the podcast itself. Enjoy.
Welcome back to the Spirituality and Leadership podcast. I am so pleased to have my new Angelina friend, Dr. Adrienne Youdim on the podcast. Adrienne is a physician specializing in medical, weight loss and mind body medicine, but much more than that. And I love having you on the show to talk about your work, to talk about your philosophy, to talk about what you do. So welcome to the show.
Adrienne Youdim: Thank you, Andrew. I'm happy, really happy to be here. And maybe we should just start by saying that we met online through Total Alignment. I heard a post or a snippet of something that you had to say, and it really resonated with me. And so I'm so excited to have this conversation because I do think we're very much in sync.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you. Well, that's intriguing. That begs the question, well, before asking you directly, in what ways do you think we're in sync and how do you resonate with this topic of spirituality in leadership I'd love if you could describe a little bit of your background and then what we're leading to is, and therefore, let's talk about these topics.
Adrienne Youdim: Yeah. So I am the first born of three first generation immigrants of Persian Jewish immigrants from Iran. My father left Iran when he was very young, 11 years old, to pursue education, which he did. He's a double PhD, spent most of his life in academia and education was a pillar, a critical, essential pillar to his personal life and to his parenting. And then my mom, also very intelligent in a different sort of way, in an emotionally intelligent sort of way. She really is kind of the epitome of nurturing, caregiving, cooking, although she worked my entire childhood. So she really balanced both of those aspects of her life. For a large part of my growing up, she actually was the breadwinner, believe it or not. So my upbringing is really colored, I think, by this strong man, educated kind of all those strong attributes. He was, by the way, sent to boarding school. So I always joke that he was raised by soldiers and in turn raised me like I was a soldier. And then by the other sensibility, which was the nurturing, the loving, the homemaking. And my work actually really embodies both of those ways in which I was raised.
Andrew Cohn: And I'm also hearing my inference that your dad was also somebody who, even if he wasn't raking in the cash at different times, but academic and highly respected there, I'm hearing status and stature. Is that accurate?
Adrienne Youdim: Yes, very much so. And it's interesting because the Persian culture is a paternalistic culture. American culture, in a lot of ways is paternalistic culture. But my dad was a staunch feminist at the same time. So while there was this kind of paternalistic kind of sentiment in the home, he also very much gave me agency. And that sense of agency, interestingly enough, is actually a really interesting opening point to talk about spirituality and even my interest in spirituality, because I think agency is something that gives us empowerment. And without that, there is almost this, I don't know, like, spiritual disconnect. This kind of, well, we'll talk about it. What I like to call a hunger that develops. And so it's interesting to, even as I'm sharing this with you, to kind of relive and to note that even though there was this kind of like father figure, there was a lot of empowerment for me and agency in how he raised me.
Andrew Cohn: And just to be really clear, when you talk about agency, especially with your training and your background, what does that mean for you?
Adrienne Youdim: To me, agency is the ability to be the master of your own life, to know that you have the skills, the tools, the bandwidth to execute your life in the way you see fit.
Andrew Cohn: And for you, because you just mentioned this, I want to hear more. What's the connection between that personal agency and spirituality? And part of the reason I'm asking this, because for some people, spirituality is that set of rules out there, which in a way might be different than personal agency and personal empowerment. So I really want to understand where you're coming from with this.
Adrienne Youdim: Yeah, so now I'm feeling like, really, I want to be on the spot and clarifying this for you, Andrew. I feel like being able to carve our own path in a professional space. It is a spiritual practice. So what I didn't get into when you asked me about my background is kind of my professional background being trained as a very Western, what I like to call white coat physician. And really operating from that place of the doctor knows and science knows, evidence based prescriptions, a lot of things that I still, you know, there's a role and there's a value in all of that. So I still hold that sacred. But in being a weight loss physician and doing all the things for my patients to help suppress their hunger so that they could lose weight, I recognized that there was an emotional hunger, a spiritual hunger. I always say there's another hunger in the room if left unmet, doesn't get to the root of what is being brought up for the individual. And I think overweight or not. We all experience those hungers. I describe them as unmet, emotional, psychological, spiritual needs.
Andrew Cohn: And as I hear you talk about that, what I'm hearing is, and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, is I don't hear that it's about suppressing that hunger. I hear it's about understanding and redirecting and feeding it in a healthy way. If I could use that verb.
Adrienne Youdim: 100% Andrew. I talk about leaning into that hunger. And oftentimes these hungers, they’re our vulnerabilities. And our inclination is to like, suppress it, squash it, hide it, distract, judge it, and distraction, whether it's with food or alcohol or smoking or drinking or overworking or people pleasing. There's a lot of ways in which we can do this, some of which are more socially sanctioned than others. But if we can change our view of this hunger and say, I wonder what this is trying to tell me, call my attention to what might be missing in my life, what might I not be paying attention to? Perhaps it's a hunger for validation. Maybe it's a hunger for perfection. What underlies that hunger? Maybe it's hunger for respite because you're working an 80 hour work week, a hundred hour work week, which I did as a resident. Maybe it's more mundane hunger for sleep, hunger for good nutritious food. So we can take this hunger and be very esoteric about it. It can be an existential hunger. It can be something very concrete, like you're just not caring for your basic human needs. And you did it for a week or two to get to this next big project, and you did it for six months while you're working on that big case. And before you know it, you've spent 20 years of your life dismissing yourself, not caring for yourself. And that leads to a sort of hunger too, that leads to even a spiritual hunger. What does that say? What are you saying about yourself and to yourself, in essence, when you are consistently neglecting your own needs in service of something or someone else. We can talk about this in the leadership space or in the corporate space. You're doing it in service of your work, your organization. We can talk about it in the home. You're doing it in the service of your child or a parent that you're taking care of. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how noble it is if you are consistently undermining yourself, your own needs, dismissing your own needs in the service of something and someone else. What is that saying about how much you value your own health and well being.
Andrew Cohn: Wow. So there's a lot in what you just said. One piece that I'd love to open up a little bit just before we lose it, is when you talked about a spiritual hunger. So what does that mean? People have talked about spirituality in a lot of different ways on this podcast, which I really appreciate. I think that's one of the whole objectives. But for you, in your work, what does that mean and how would you categorize and look at it as something spiritual as opposed to in another domain?
Adrienne Youdim: I feel like this term means a lot of things, even for me personally at different times of my life and in different contexts. But for me, I think the ultimate spiritual experience is recognizing our own inherent wisdom, value, interconnectedness with the people and the things around us. I think we all have that spark. However, in our fast paced world, we don't give time for that to unfold or to be recognized or to be acknowledged. And that too leads to a hunger. You talked about how I brought my background in mind body skills, which is a relatively new thing that I've done, although I've always incorporated in my work in the last 20 years of working with patients. And essentially right now it's giving people the tools to create that space, to create that pause, to create that even agency again. Right. Like, you know deep down what matters, what you value. You know deep down what your next best move is. I even personally right now, I'm in a circumstance where I'm pivoting once again or thinking about things differently in my professional space. And I'm noticing myself, maybe I should get a coach, maybe I should read another book, maybe I should listen to another podcast. And it's great. There's so much out there, there's so many resources out there. And I 100% support gathering an army, gathering the people around you that can help you propel you to the next level. But I also believe that we all have that inherent wisdom within us. And some spirituality is even the act of giving that attention and the opportunity to unfold that is a deep and spiritual practice.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, thank you, I appreciate that. And as I hear you talk about the deep down we know. Well, in my world anyway, as a coach and as a leadership consultant and as a person and as a dad, as a human, deep down, especially in the pace and the noise level and the static of this world, deep down isn't accessible without the pause that you talk about. There's an incredibly practical connection between the pause and accessing that thing that you say we all know deep down. Yeah, but we can't access it unless or until. In an earlier podcast, I remember a rich conversation talking about how many of us can be very reluctant to really quiet down because we're afraid. And this happens a lot with senior leaders who I'm talking with in the lonely at the top kind of context. And they say I don't really give myself the opportunity to really, really quiet down because I'm hearing all these voices that are gaining on me or these critical voices or something like that. So we're afraid to quiet down, perhaps because of the recognition that there's these critical voices and guess what's available also if we quiet down the deep down inner knowing which we can't access if I've got four screens open, literally or figuratively. So I love the practicality of what you're talking about. Deep down, we all know. And that pause, the power of that.
Adrienne Youdim: And there's different ways to get to that. So I remember in the time of my training and studying and early on in my professional life, really all the way up to Covid, I still run now, but back then, like, running was, gosh, it was like medicine. It was like soul food. And first of all, let me put in a caveat here, a parentheses, to say that I have a great story that I share in my book Hungry for More about running that mile that we have to run. In many public schools, you have to run a mile once a week or three times a week. And I would run. It was like a 14 to 16 minute run. I mean, it was a crawl.
Andrew Cohn: Sounds very unsatisfying for you.
Adrienne Youdim: Yes. So I give that caveat. But then years later, after my first child and while I was a resident, I ran the LA marathon. So I want to put that range. Because a lot of times when I talk about this story, people are like, well, I don't get that. I'm not a runner. There's so many ways in which you have an entry point here. But I digress. When I go out for a run, my head is one big hot mess. I mean, my head is so busy. And oftentimes that is exactly the moment where I'm like, I'm going to pop off if I don't just put my shoes on and get out. Usually it's not this, like, desire to move my body and get an exercise. It's really this feeling that, like, my head is just so busy that I just can't unless I exert myself. And then I find over the course of, like, the run, like, super noisy and crowded headspace. And invariably by the end, it gets quieter. It gets quieter, it gets more distant. And I get to the point where I'm just listening to, like, the ch, ch, ch of my feet on the pavement. It's a practice for all these people who say, I can't. My head is too busy. Guess what? That is the human condition. There is nothing unique about anyone in that sense. And while the running, again, I do it, still, I'm finding that now, at this time of my life, I need more softer practices to get to that stillness. So I'm going for walks. Whereas even a year ago, I thought walking was just a sheer waste of time and energy. But now I need that. That is how I access my stillness. Journaling, breathing, drawing. I mean, there's so many entry points. I bring this up because I think a lot of people who are in leadership, and I think whether you're a CEO of a company or not, we're all leaders in some capacity in our work, in our households, in our communities. We all have busy minds, and we all need the opportunity. To your point, Andrew, particularly at this moment in time when there's so much noise.
Andrew Cohn: And I love what you said about this phrase about accessing my stillness, which is something that I have heard in so many different forms, including on this podcast, speaking with different people. What does that actually mean? So let's get into actions here, and we can zoom in and zoom out, but let's zoom in to some tactics here. So by inference, I'm hearing the power of accessing one's stillness. Perhaps that is–don't let me put words in your mouth, correct me–but perhaps that's about, so I can really understand what maybe that hunger is about or what those unmet needs are about. And again, correct me if I'm wrong. And so how do we do that? So walking, maybe one. And now you're a proud walker. I could see that on your T-shirt. You're a proud walker. But what are some other ways to access the stillness and otherwise tune in to understand that hunger?
Adrienne Youdim: I love to give a very practical analogy here or explanation. So when we talk about even physical hunger or physical cravings, right? Oftentimes there's very little space between the trigger and the reaction. You think about that piece of, I don't know, cake in the refrigerator, you're there. You think about that bag of chips in the pantry. Boom, you're there. Right?
Andrew Cohn: How did you know I was thinking about that right now, by the way?
Adrienne Youdim: I saw it in your face. Or even, like when we want to eat something, right? Like with Doordash and Uber Eats, you can think about, gosh, I really wish I had spaghetti and meatballs tonight. Boom, it's done. Right? So again, it's reactivity. It's zero space between the trigger and the reaction. And how many times do we have that sentiment when it comes to cravings, when we are not even hungry? Like there's no genuine hunger, right. But if you think about it long enough, you start to salivate. Especially when physical and emotional hunger sometimes are difficult to be discerned on the physical level. Right. How do you create that discernment? Well, we have to create this pause, we have to create this opportunity of not reacting, this period in which there is space between the trigger and the reaction. So back to your question. There's a lot of ways that we can do that. I'll tell you. I think breathing, the word breathing is either something that people will be like, ah, like they really appreciate, or like it drives them nuts. I can tell you that five years ago I was of the latter category, that if somebody told me just breathe, I think I would just want to toss them across the room because it just doesn't make sense to me and.
Andrew Cohn: It's irritating and condescending. I know I have to breathe, Dr. Adrienne I know.
Adrienne Youdim: Right. I know, exactly. But if people really just do this for a moment, like even if you don't buy into it, indulge us. Close their eyes, drop their shoulders, soften the muscles in their face and take three deep breaths, imagining that air coming down into the gut, into the belly and out through the mouth. I promise you, if anyone has an aura ring or an apple heart rate monitor or the likes, within 30 seconds of doing that, the heart rate comes down, blood vessels dilate, the blood pressure comes down. That cardiovascular system then sends a message of ease and relaxation to the brain. The brain is like, cool, things are okay here. And that space allows for the frontal lobe to light back up for us to be more clear headed and intentional in our decision making. I mean, this is very much rooted in science, otherwise I wouldn't be into it. And I know there's a lot of influencers out there that talk about this and, but if you really think about the science of this, that the stress response, and I know people have heard about it before in kitschy sorts of ways, but like, let's really think about this, the stress response was created to get us out of harm's way. Except that right now what triggers a stress response is the news and deadlines and social media and all this noise that you referenced earlier. And so it puts us in this state of high alert. The high alert state was meant for us to react. Therefore, the liver shoots off, releases glycogen, which is in essence glucose or sugar, so that our muscles have energy to run. Our eyesight narrows so that we can focus on the predator. Our heart rate and our respiratory rate go up so that we can feed more oxygen to the muscles in our body again so that we can run. And then when the stress goes away, things should go back to baseline. By the way, what also happens in that acute stress response is that non essential functions shut down. Digestion, reproduction, frontal lobe thinking, because you don't need to pontificate about stuff if a tiger is running after you. But if we're in that state all the time, then we can't think clearly. When we bring in these practices, we literally turn on the frontal lobe. So when we're in a state like making this really practical now, when we're in a situation right now where we were just talking prior to recording this podcast about funding being cut to the UC schools where I'm at.
So imagine you're a leader, you're an educator at the UC school system, and there's financial instability and potential job instability and political turmoil and global affairs. And maybe you also have stuff going on in your own household. Maybe you're fighting with your husband, maybe your kid is depressed or using all your money. I mean, all the other trivial and mundane things happening. And your brain is on high alert and you don't have the tools to regulate, to create space. You literally cannot function at your highest capacity. And so these practices, spirituality and leadership, these things are really so intertwined and interconnected. And as a white coat doctor, I would have never come to this work had I not recognized the true functional physiological takeaways that are at play.
Andrew Cohn: Wow. So two quick ideas here. One is that in my world, working with leaders in the business context, like you said, the non essential function shut down. So when we are on high alert, when we are reactive, when we feel that we're under threat, we literally can't think clearly. We cannot think expansively, we cannot consider what are the options, because as you said, it's all about narrowing the focus and getting away. So in a very practical way, we just can't think very well if we're under that sort of stress. I see that and hear about that a lot. So if there's tension on a team, if there's stress within an organization. We get into the meeting room and we're already compromised. It's like somebody is already taking half the oxygen out of the room and saying, okay, solve this problem. But a question I have for you, and I just want to check on my layperson's understanding. So when we are on high alert and our systems are limited in that way, as you said, ideally after that stress passes, things will calm back down. But my understanding scientifically, and please help here, is that, well, it doesn't really work that way because some of those stress related hormones and things that the liver might be throwing into our systems actually stay in our bodies for a while. And it's not an instantaneous thing, even if we are a practiced meditator or something like that. Is that accurate?
Adrienne Youdim: Correct. It isn't instantaneous. What I'm referring to as not instantaneous but pretty immediate.
Andrew Cohn: Okay.
Adrienne Youdim: Is kind of that feedback loop, right? Your heart rate is up, your blood pressure is up, you're feeling that sense of anxiety physically in your body. You're breathing shallow and rapidly, and that is re-stimulating or signaling that sympathetic or that stress response by creating this.
Andrew Cohn: Vicious cycle sort of thing. But that breathing, that stimulation, that energetic systemic response creates the fast breathing, which causes my system to react even further.
Adrienne Youdim: Correct. So like hyperventilating gets perpetuated upon itself through the brain and the hyperventilation, there's like the body's rapid breathing response. There's also like the brain freaking out. Oh my God. So these play into each other. Whereas when we do this kind of intentional breathing, when we're relaxing the muscles in our face, in our body, I mean, I think even if people just spend two seconds right now while they're listening to this podcast and notice if their shoulders are shrugged up, just dropping the shoulders down, noticing if their teeth are clenched, relaxing the facial muscles, and then also back to the breathing.
Andrew Cohn: Let me interrupt you one second for two reasons. One, if you're driving while listening to this podcast.
Adrienne Youdim: Thank you.
Andrew Cohn: Please do not close your eyes, because what I'd love to invite you to do is help me. My hand is raised. And anyone who might be listening with the types of questions you're about to ask and the types of invitation you're about to make about scanning and relaxing and redirecting and breaking out of that cycle, could you lead us through a few minutes of that?
Adrienne Youdim: Yeah.
Andrew Cohn: Or do you want to say more before you do that, please?
Adrienne Youdim: Well, either way. But I'll just finish your last question by saying that quite literally, when people engage in this breathing and breathe into the belly, as opposed to kind of at the tops of the lungs, changing that intra abdominal pressure, that's where the vagus nerve resides. And again, all of this to say, not to get technical, but there's a physiologic way in which people are actively turning on that parasympathetic or the rest and relaxed part of the nervous system, such that the heart rate will go down, the blood pressure will go down. So these bodily sensations are literally perceived by the mind in a different way. And so while you're right, some of these factors like the cortisol or the adrenaline, and some of these things are not like, switch on, switch off, right? Some of these other things, physiologic processes, like heart rate, quite literally is. And if people, when they're not in the car, do this work and then want to go back and look at their heart rate monitors, they will find that, in fact, it is changing their physiology. Now, in terms of practices, it can be really simple. And I find that even if the breathing thing feels like too much or triggers the reaction, that the former Adrienne can appreciate. Even just noticing where you hold tension in your body, Is it in your jaws? Is it between your brows? Are your eyebrows raised? Is it in your shoulders? Do you walk around with your hands clenched? I even do this in bed sometimes. I'm laying down and it occurs to me that I'm not laying down. And what I mean by that is I'm like horizontal, but I'm still holding myself up, like I'm not fully rested. And so if I give myself a few cues in bed, I do this all the time. Sink into the bed. Allow your neck to sink into the bed. Allow your shoulders to sink into the bed. Allow your buttocks and the backs of your legs to sink into the bed. I promise you, you'll have this aha moment where you're like, oh, my God. I was like, hovering over my bed because I was so tense. And I find that when I do that, I actually am able to fall asleep. And how I came to this is that I have three children. And my youngest child has always been a terrible sleeper since infancy. And so to this day, she's 12 years old. I have to help get her internal environment conducive to sleep. And I found that when I started talking to her like this because it wasn't helping to tell her to breathe or to meditate or watch her belly rise and fall. What I would tell her, can you just let your hands sink into the bed? Let your head sink into the bed. Invariably I'd get her to fall asleep.
Andrew Cohn: Well, I love the practicality of that and the recognition of who is your most important patient and the keys to really supporting her. And in a way, what I'm hearing is, and forgive me, I'm not trying to be too semantic here, but you didn't get her to fall asleep. She knew how to fall asleep. If she can make those adjustments, her body knows how to fall asleep. And it gets back to that. Our bodies know what to do if we can support them a little bit. And I love the very practical interventions that you're offering.
Adrienne Youdim: Yeah. I will also say that I am as type A as they can get. And we always talk about people who are kind of in this space of like, guiding others. We only do the work we do out of pure self interest or having stumbled upon something that helped us so radically that we're like, wow, like I have to share. And so this work in, I recognize that we're kind of. We've bounced around, but that's okay. Acknowledging or recognizing a hunger was work that I very much needed because I was hungry for validation, for autonomy, for self compassion. And then the practical skills of how do we actually do this work so that we are more safe and sane and functional in our work, in our relationships. That also that practical piece of the skills also was by necessity.
Andrew Cohn: Would you mind, I know I'm putting you on the spot a little bit. Would you mind sharing a bit of your story and the recognition of the necessity of that? Did it have to do, for example, with a traditional medical practice, crazy long hours, the stress related to certain dimensions of your work, or was it more than that? But if you don't mind to share a bit of your story and how you came to recognize this.
Adrienne Youdim: I don't mind at all. And I would say that it came far before the rigor of medical training. It came from wanting to achieve and conflating my achievement with my personal value, thinking that I was only good enough for as long as I kept checking the boxes. It came from perfectionism, not allowing myself the grace of making mistakes or not always being on. That's a big one. There's one thing in the pursuit of achieving certain successes, and then once you achieve certain successes, the feeling for me at least, that, like, now I have to maintain that level of success at all times. I actually became medical director of a program that I created straight out of residency at a major institution. And I did that in my 30s and then I got into my 40s and I was, even though I did a lot of things, I transitioned to private practice, I wrote a book, I did a TED talk. I learned all these different modalities, you know, being really upset with myself that like I didn't match the pace of what got me to that position in my 30s. In my mind I was like, well, hell, if I can be medical director at 30 something, then I can, I don't know, I don't even know what I wanted, you know, take over the world or the region by 40. But I remember feeling this sense of like, ah. I didn't capitalize on that momentum and that constant striving that created a, I mean, you want to call it an itch, a discomfort, a misalignment, I like to call it as a hunger that I also saw in my patients. By the way, they were coming to me to lose 20 pounds maybe or to lose 50 pounds that they clicked on over the course of the years. But what was really going on? What was really underlying that hunger? And so I found this true alignment between what I kind of in my mind understood as this spiritual hunger with personal experience. So in the book Hungry for More, I go through 30 or 40 hungers and in every single one, a patient comes in where we uncover this hunger. And then I talk about how I can relate. And so there was this alignment between external experience or somebody on the outside, a patient experience, personal experience, validation in the science as well as my own intuition. And that takes us back to this idea of spirituality in a different way. Recognizing when I am in the room, 20 years of patient care and collecting all of these stories and having the privilege of being the recipient of all of these stories and being like, oh my God, like it doesn't matter who you are, where you've come from. For me, sometimes the biggest aha, especially when I was younger, was seeing like a 60 year old high level executive or professional and someone who like arrived and being like, wow, this hunger is so universal that like I'm this Persian Jewish 30 something year old and here's this like white 60 something head of an organization, thousand person organization. And that hunger is universal. And that is part of what we started saying early on is that one of the ways of describing spirituality is recognizing the interconnectedness between us, the universal themes, the struggles, the challenges, the triumphs that connect us all. That too is a form of spirituality.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, absolutely. It's beautiful and I love the way you bring your different dimensions of your personal experience. As you said, the science. It's interesting how you earlier you said, I love the science and it's sacred. And I never think of science as sacred. I think of science as changeable. And yet it is sacred. And it is that important until it changes, which is okay too. But the way you bring the different dimensions of your own experience, I'm certainly your own passion and enthusiasm and the work that you're here to do, that's what I hear the book, just to be clear, called Hungry for More: Stories and Science to Inspire Weight Loss from the Inside Out. I believe that was 2021, is that correct? And that's available on Amazon in the TED Talk. Your hunger is the key to understanding your unmet needs. And I love the way just the simplicity of hunger, unmet needs. It's so broad, it's so relatable, it's so easily understandable. You're not losing me with the science and the practicality of the. As you said, we know what that is deep down. We just need how do we access? So I appreciate the practices that you're highlighting. Is there anything else that I mean we could talk for hours about this, but I'm wondering if there's anything else top of mind for you in terms of approaches or things to keep in mind to sort of invite people, including me. My hand is raised into this inquiry and into this practice a little bit more. Is there something else that you often talk about that maybe you could highlight?
Adrienne Youdim: You know, I think it's really important to just meet yourself where you're at and to have an open mindedness about the practice or about the intention and about yourself. There are times in which certain things just don't jazz, they just don't resonate with me and that's okay. There's times where I'm seeking more intensity. Sometimes where I'm seeking more calm. Perhaps going for a run is an entry point for me on certain days when intensity is present and journaling, which I've done every day of my life since I was 7 years old, is something else that I access. Just meet yourself where you're at. Recognize there's a lot of different ways to get to this place that we're talking about. And I would also say to not dismiss yourself as I'm too this, I'm too that, I think too much, I'm too busy. Nobody is too anything for anything. One of the other offerings I have is 8 week mind body course called Resilient Minds. It's geared towards people like us, Andrew, and where I teach these skills and every so often I gift the program if I have a few spots left. And just this morning I was talking to this high level executive from New York who I've befriended and really love and really think that she would benefit from this work. I was like, don't even finish that sentence. There is no high achieving professional that has two hours a week just plopped into their lap, right? Nobody has expendable time. Another thing that I talk about in the book is actually a line that I wrote in the book is that time is something that we create for that which we value. And so if this is valuable, and I think our personal health and well being should be valuable in of itself. And by the way, your personal health and well being also is inextricably linked to your relational well being and to your professional well being. So if your personal health and well being is not like the hook for you right now, do it because of your professional wellbeing, because these things are all intertwined. If you value that, then you must create the time for your own well being.
Andrew Cohn: Right. It always triggers me when people say, I need to find the time. No, no, no, you're not going to find it. You need to make it, you need to create it. And I would imagine that in your world, in the medical world, people are maybe a little bit more incentivized because of some serious health concern or something like that. I would imagine that that's often how people find you.
Adrienne Youdim: There are these teachable moments and health scares are often teachable moments. Someone who got a new diagnosis of diabetes and knows that weight loss will help, or sleep apnea, or their knees are hurting, their mobility is affected, these are all teachable moments. But also I have patients who come to me and clients who come to me for the mind body work because their relationship with their partner has come to a head or their role in their organization feels jeopardized. Or to be honest, one thing that is very common right now is that what's going on the outside, like the world affairs, the global affairs, the political affairs, we're recording this podcast the week of the Charlie Kirk murder. And I'll be honest with you, I'm very savvy. I read the news all the time. I had no idea who he was before all this. My kids who are in college knew. And it doesn't matter what your politics are, it doesn't matter what your views are to see that. And a friend sent the video before I even had any idea what I was opening. That is so jarring. That is so scarring. And I say this as someone who has witnessed a lot of death in my life, I actually posted on Instagram the day after I've done chest compressions on more people than I can remember. As a resident in my time in the hospital that never came back to life, I called time of death during code blues. My grandfather was on hospice and I was administering morphine. My cousin got ovarian cancer in her 50s and I was the last person to put my head on hers and say, it's okay, you can go. I mean, it gets me emotional, and yet watching that video upset me on such a violent and horrific level. And I'm accustomed to seeing death. So whether we give ourselves the time and space and grace to acknowledge it, we are all being inundated by so much toxicity that I think now is the time to do this work for all of us. No matter who you are or what lane you're in.
Andrew Cohn: Well, I feel that that's a wonderful way to land this plane, if that's okay with you. I've mentioned your book. I've mentioned your TED Talk. Where can people find out more about you and your work, including the upcoming online programs?
Adrienne Youdim: Yes, so dradrienneyoudim.com you can find all of my resources there. I also do keynotes and retreats for leadership in organizations and I always love to hear from people. So even if you go and find my email on the site and let me know what landed about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you so much and I love hearing from you. And the conversation will continue. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your personal experience, your practical suggestions, and your time and your energy. Thank you for creating the time to be in this conversation.
Adrienne Youdim: I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you for listening to Spirituality in Leadership. If you want to access this wealth of knowledge and insight on a regular basis, please subscribe to the show. Join the network of leaders who want to do and be better. You can go to the site spiritualityinleadership.com or your preferred podcast platform to catch all the episodes and learn more. Until next time, take good care of yourself.