Guest Intro And Big Questions

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Nick Potter, who is a consultant osteopath at King Edwards VII Hospital in London. He researches Bendy Body's Bendy Brands, studying the relationship between hypermobility, ADHD, anxiety, and nervous system regulation.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

He is the author of The Meaning of Pain, a radical new approach to overcoming chronic pain, which has been translated into several languages. His book explores how modern stress, biology, behavior, and breathing can interact with pain.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

In the early 2000s, Nick worked in Paris with Alain Prose team doctor for the Institut Biomédical Sport Evi. There he conducted intensive assessments of Formula One drivers and their environments, going on to be a human performance advisor to Jaguar F1. From the findings they made, particularly in sleep and stress medicine, the concept of the corporate athlete was formulated, which Nick presented at NCI Business School.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Through his links with Brevin Howard, he's worked with John Coates and Danny Kahneman to study stress responses universal to us all, which are independent of personality type. Nick knows through personal experience of a spinal injury what pain is all about. Through applying his principle, he is now pain-free. We talk about how Descartes was wrong. It should be a synergy of mind and body.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Captain Tom and how motion is lotion.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Do we really move less now than we did before?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

The importance of dancing.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Is asthma a stress response?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

How keeping healthy can cost nothing.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Keeping traders then.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

The practice of interoception.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Is anger unaddressed fear?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Let us move. Hi, this is Amida Sharing.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

And Natasha McElhone, and with us today we have Nick Potter.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Hi Nick, thanks

Why Descartes Got The Body Wrong

SPEAKER_00 2:05

for taking the time. Absolute pleasure to be here. We want to talk about uh the body. That's my world. There was this guy called Descartes, and he came up with this notion of res extensa and res cogitans. In particular, what that means for our conversation today is that he was suggesting we are our minds rather than our bodies. And you think that's fundamentally wrong, and you want to tell us why.

SPEAKER_03 2:28

Descartes, great, great man, in his time, before neuroscience developed and psychology, actually, you know, we could study it at a much greater level. I think he's wrong. Uh I think that's fairly accepted he's wrong. And medicine, unfortunately, where obviously the paradigm I live exist in is um has been defined by it for an awfully long time. And I think we um are now suddenly waking up to the fact that it's wrong. And that actually we're so obsessed with cognition, the process of thinking, which now actually defines even's kind of social status now. You know, oh he's terribly bright, he's terribly clever, etc., is that we're concentrating only on the brain's function, but not that how it builds models of the world. And that without your body, your brain is blamange, it really is. I mean, it's just a it's just a great big lump of millions of cells which have to learn, and it can only learn from all the multi-sensory um organs that we have in our body that feed in from the periphery. And the reason I think that we can now prove these wrong, I mean, I've been very lucky to work with a uh wonderful man called uh Professor Carl Friston, or certainly with his work, and he has set up a thing called the free entropy theory, which is really basically what we call predictive processing in in computational science, but it's really a model of how the brain builds models of the world and how we orientate ourselves in it. And it's pretty definitive, and I haven't seen anything, I don't think anybody's seen anything better uh since, um, which is that basically the brain builds models of the world through sensory information, which is the moment you leave your mother's womb, um, you are an active engager in the world, and you use your sensory systems to start building models first through your the mouth mainly. Babies always put things in their mouths, right? Um, because there's a huge sensory representation of the mouth, and actually the hands, they're the two biggest areas of the body that have a representation in the cortex of the brain. And you start building models of everything from texture to feel to touch to temperature, um, and that's all through the body. We've ignored that for an awfully long time, and I think the ancients knew it. Medicine to a certain extent has got a big apology to make actually to what they used to disparagely call the complementary medicine world. Because if you look at it, we're all going to our breathing and our yoga now, which you know I've been in practice 30 years, and you know, I remember a time when you know, if you were referring to the complementary world, you could be stuck, you could be struck off, you know. And now suddenly we're all returning to that because we realise that actually medicine is very limited in what it can offer. Certainly things like surgery, um, chemotherapy is you know, obviously vital, but but actually pretty brutal to people. Um, so I think we've we've reverted that. And it's it's but it takes about 15 years, certainly in this country, for medical science to change its mind, which is very sad. And I've certainly been involved in that, seen it in my own practice.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

I understand that there was a over-reliance on the mind. Yes. But it it is ultimately the synergy of the two that is. It's a fusion of the two.

SPEAKER_03 5:03

It's a fusion of the two, I think. Sometimes the reason I find the neuroscience um element of it, which is something that has only really come into the fore in the last 20 years, because we can use a thing called functional MRI scanning, which is a major change, and we could actually watch the parts of the brain. Because unfortunately, unlike rats, when I was doing research, etc., we can put lesions in their brain and see what happens. We can't do that to humans naturally, um, much as we'd like to, probably sometimes. Uh, but it's but what we can do is obviously measure when people have got lesions, and this is where people like the wonderful uh Oliver Sachs back in the day, wonderful neurologist, he would literally travel the world to go and interview people who had had lesions like strokes and tumours in very strange deep parts of the brain we still didn't understand, and he would see how these very subtle manifestations came through in behaviour and mind and etc. Um, I think without getting into deep philosophy about what is mind, I mean I think mind is yeah, is the fusion of your sensory input, how you build models of the world. Consciousness is that you are just actively living and experiencing affect, which is the feeling coming through from your body. Um, and then consciousness, cognition is the action plan you place in order to orientate yourself towards the meta-narrative that, yeah. So I think you know, we're so much clearer on that now, and that's what I think really undermines um Descartes' theory. Um, but you also could look at historically where he was in the world, etc., without that technology. You know, these guys were brilliant. I think we want to you know defame them. Even Freud, who's been criticized many times, you know, always said there were only two primal drives and they were very basic, and what and then of course we build layers of why they're not acceptable just to have free form in society. And I think he's his stuff's now coming back in. But he was a neurologist, he wasn't a psychotherapist until much later, but he worked it out just by thousands of interviews, yeah, and that was academic rigor. You know, I don't think we're seeing that rigor anymore. Actually, it's very sad. We're not seeing people who just stood in a sat in a lab for their entire career just working out empirically where it came from. I think that um Jean-Claude Piaget's work is still the most definitive work done into neuro child neurodevelopment, not only into how they develop and form and stand up and move and play. He was very big on play. Um, but also uh that it found founded the it was the foundation of a moral structure in society. You know, if you and I don't get on, we don't have a reciprocal this is a reciprocal play that we're doing right now. Um we follow rules, we we're organized, uh, and that makes society work. Uh and I think that we've tried now to superimpose quite a lot of ideological ideals on that, which are really at loggerheads with what the human brain really wants to do neurobiologically.

SPEAKER_04 7:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

You're saying that there's so much going on, obviously, in the body, there's a lot of intelligence built into it. Why don't we experience that?

SPEAKER_03 7:38

Where it depends how deep you want to go. I mean, I think I think DNA is a very interesting thing. I mean, if you look at the the core of DNA, it's it's millions of years old. And it's rather lovely that you know to think that what you're you're you're the greatest iteration of everyone that went before you. It's a burden to a certain extent, uh, in a good way. And um, actually, I think one of the reasons that people want to go into a marathon, they want to test themselves, is because you don't know what embedded potential you have in your chromosomes until you test them. And we saw that in things like ultramarathon. Technically, we couldn't understand how physiologically that was possible. Things like Iron Man, really, you shouldn't be able to produce enough energy to actually complete one. And people who did the polar exploration, there's a wonderful guy with Ronald Fiennes, and he was using heavy oxygen to monitor, heavy water rather, to monitor what the body did under extreme environments. And he found a whole new panoply of processes that the body could draw and how it distributed these minerals, how the water, etc., was distributed and then used in metabolism that we'd never seen before. But he only found that out in extreme cold and also in extreme energy usage. So this is what's interesting. I think this is why it's in the brain to test itself. Okay. Um and to move forward. I mean, we know that the brain works on a value system. I need to move from point A to point B, but point B needs to be better than point A. And of course, this is at the heart of depression. If you can't see point B, then you're in a hole. And that's suffering. So, in a sense, when you talk about the Buddhists always say life is suffering, it sounds terribly negative. But that's how the brain works, is I'm looking for the place that's better than I am now. How do I move forward? Or how do I move forward

Movement Drives Mood And Aging

SPEAKER_03 9:05

towards the goal?

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Doesn't it feel like everybody feels that way about yes?

SPEAKER_03 9:08

Yeah, unfortunately. I'd lucky I did a paper when I was training in into medical social history, and you look at actually how disease, how, how environments have moulded how we are, the one thing we were was a lot more physical, even as far as back as the Edwardian times. You know, uh, even if you're an aristocrat, you'd still have to ride your horse to your house to London. You'd have to even riding a carriage was quite arduous. You know, you had to walk every move everywhere, there was no one going to do it for you. Um, and even things like drawing water, cooking, it was a much more physical job, and there was much less abundance. We were all skinnier, you know. Um, and I think the in a world that is intrinsically very safe, actually. I mean, if you go to parts of the world that I have working in places like Solangola and India, you know, those guys are grateful for just waking up, you know. And I think we've forgotten that in the West. And we we moan quite a lot that things should always be better, but we have abundance in everything. And it's made us very lazy. If you don't look after your body, it doesn't look after your brain because it's less good at feeding that sensory information. And our brains are actually designed to move, not to think. A good example of that is that we have what we call affect in the neuroscience, which is feeling. Okay, so you have thirst, it's a feeling. You don't really know what it is, it's just it's a call to action, which is to drink. You gratify the need and it goes back down the hole. You do the same with with eating. I'm hungry, I gratify sex, I feel horny, I gratify, I feel better. Okay, so they all just come up through affective feeling, which is a call to action. Right. But even with social emotions like despondency, sadness, aggression, they all should be manifest in a physical outcome. You know, I as you know, I work in a in a hedge fund, and I can see these guys in the old days in the 80s, they would be standing with stripy jackets, screaming at each other on a trading floor, but it was very physical, right? And they were shouting whether they're winning or losing, they were manifesting it. And then the market shut and everybody went for a beer. You know, I mean they called it the pit, right? It was this sort of healthily adversarial environment. But now they sit at a computer, lose 20 million quid, and have to go mmm, bummer, right? And you can see them physically tensioning. Because if you can't put it into if you can't put it into an action, it is stored energy. And I don't mean Buddhist energy, I'm talking stored metabolic energy. It's got to go somewhere. What I see a lot in my practice now is that I say to patients, you're not actually stiff, you're tense. There's a big difference. So why are you tense?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

So we're jumping around on a few different topics, which I'd love to pull on. Maybe let's go to where you want it to go.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Oh well, it really feeds into what you've just been saying about I don't even know where this phrase comes from, but it's very old, but move a muscle, change a mood. Yes. Absolutely. The connection between so obvious things not so strange is but your lovely example that you spoke about or maybe wrote about of what what's his name, the guy in lockdown who was walking, who was a big thing. Oh Captain Tom. Captain Tom was.

SPEAKER_03 11:48

I mean, great, I mean, great fa I f I watched that fascinating. So he embodied everything I say to my older patients, which is that you know there was a sort of 98-year-old man, um, pretty unable to speak, you know, he was really bl uh uh and deaf and you know and pretty withdrawn from the world, sitting in an armchair. And then one day he got up and he walked a thousand yards, basically what he did, right? With his with and suddenly by the end of it, he was engaged. If you noticed, he could suddenly sing a song, you know, what was it, um I'm forever floating bubbles or whatever it was, and but he'd also engage, and then by the end of it, he was able pretty much without his zymphrame to go and receive his OBE from the Queen and engage with her. So by reactivating his body, and what we know happens as soon as you move is and as you change position, you orientate yourself on the world, you build what we call neuronal arborization, which is the nerve cells, start bridging and synapsing, even at 98. And that's what he did. And of course, he started in g in integrating his senses, which is hearing, which is positional and directional, vision, same thing, and he began to articulate much more because he was actually communicating and working with people. This is what we see with these elderly people. Once you go into a nursing home, you're there to die, you're not there to survive, you know, and you are you are isolated and you shut down. Uh, and they stop living, not just it's not just really about aging. So I think it's um yeah, so I mean he he just got up and did that, and that's what and then you know he got an OBE for it.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

But what is it that stops people? I mean, I know there's a myriad of reasons, whether it's agrophobia, whether it's just uh a loss of desire.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

Well, 65% of the population, why do they get up, should they get up or move? Because because you you've you're seeking a goal. Joints creaking. Yes, joints.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

So what the moment we feel a bit of discomfort or pain, it is that part of the cycle as well that we don't like?

SPEAKER_03 13:26

We can get into what pain is in in a different maybe separate conversation. But yeah, no, it it is is for example, if you if you're sitting working at a laptop for hours, right, and suddenly and you just sat, you're sitting on your tissues, on your bum. Okay. Now that that is living tissue that needs to move and pump. The blood system needs to move around the body, and the nerves that are moving through it need to breathe, as I call it, okay? Which is just they need a circulatory system. If you just sit in one place, you also I'm I'm beginning to get it in now, sitting in that, you know, I just I need to shift, right? But something in my brain said, you need to shift, which is I'm feeling compression, we're getting a tissue change that's been fed up through my spinal cord to my brain, which is it's unpleasant. What we call the periacoductal gray system says this is unpleasant. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna move. I just do it without even thinking about it. And so um it's a c it's a call to action. But if you are in a world of abundance where need is very quickly gratified, I can just have a glass of water, you know, I don't go up now to the sink and get it because it's just provided for me, there's no reason for me to move. So it's it's I'm retracting back into an environment because I can get my needs immediately. You know, if you're thirsty walking down the street, you're not gonna worry about that, particularly because you need I can go to the coffee shop, get a bottle of water, I can go to the drinking fountain. If you and me were in the Akatama Desert, it would have an entirely different meaning. You know, I've got a little bit of water left, but I've actually got 20 miles to go in the driest part of the world and there's no immediate civilization. The meaning of that affect is now suddenly ramped up. I've really got to drink because I'll be dead in 24 hours if I don't. So it's all it's all ramped up with with meaning as to what you need to do. But if we live in this wonderful world in the West, which is very comfortable, I can grab food from the fridge in five seconds, I can I can get water, um, all those affects are immediately gratified. You don't there is no goal, there is no there is no drive to move. There is no reason to get up and move, and it's very worrying. And it's actually the thing that ages you quickest. Because if orientating yourself in the world requires high resolution, fine-tuned movement, okay, then you need to move and you have to have iteration of that movement. It's like practice, you practice a tennis shot and you get better at it in just moving daily and getting used to those movements. And this is what you see in a child when you fast first ask them to pick up a knife, you know, he's very clumsy with it, and then he builds up a higher resolution of movement and orientation, and what you're experiencing is his brain literally going ding ding ding ding all these lovely little neurons binding together. And um he practices that movement, but also he centers the brain because the brain can't orientate itself in the world, and that's very stressful if you can't. So if you become disabled, you you have a limb missing, etc. Part of the rehabilitation is just reintegrating a new state into the nervous system, and it's amazingly able to do it.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

But do you think if there is a breaking down uh whether whether it's brain plaque or whether it's vascular as we age and people's memories start to fail, do you think okay, the call to action is actually work twice as hard as a young person because you need to Yeah, you need to build that.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

I mean you build you build all of the future um as a child. And we're I mean, for example, I I'm I I'm appalled at how we just don't see kids taking exercise. And I don't mean to go and get fit, just move and and orientate yourself on the again, they're just sitting in front of screens. It's easy just to watch that to get stimulated, right? You're just distracted instead of actually having to put the work into. And you benefit from the work. Work is always an outcome. So you do the movement, you do the thing, etc. And it's like going to the gym. I feel better. Why? Well, I've got my cardiovascular system going, but also I feel tenser, I feel stronger, and I feel more imminent in the world.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

But people do tons of focused exercise. I mean, there are gyms everywhere, there's yoga studios everywhere. There are people running every month. People didn't used to jog. When I was a kid, literally, if you if you were a runner and you were intent upon doing a marathon, you might go for a run. Yeah. There was no run running along the seafront. I mean, people stared at you.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

But you can literally split the world into those that do and those that don't. You'll be horrified by how many people are not doing that. You can see them everywhere. And if you're a nice middle-class educated person who knows that with respect, that's what you're going to do. If you work in NHS, if you see a see a different subset of the population, they really are not moving out of their couch.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

I think what Nick points out is that the average movement across society has come down, and there and you're pointing out that there's a bifurcation as well. So the problem is that a lot of people don't need to move as much anymore, and that's a fact, right? Yeah. And those people just don't, and the other side gets it and moves a lot, but that doesn't mean that the problem is not real, right? Um, and it's possible that your training data from your youth suggested that not many people were taking it that seriously, but everybody was taking it more seriously. Yeah. So to say, that's kind of what's going on.

SPEAKER_03 17:58

I think what backs it up is great data that the the Swedes are really good at this. They love really sort of boring um data for for ergonomics and all the stuff that bores me senseless. But um what's interesting, they actually showed that if you if you sit for an eight-hour day at a desk, which doing a workout, there you go. But if you do a workout at the end of the day, it doesn't negate the effect. It doesn't negate the effect. Movement does. Right. So getting up regular, going, you know, set so I had a trade the other day. He went and got himself three glasses of water. He sat right. It's just finding that, make make these drives. I don't care if you use an app, you know, you just just say after 40 minutes, once you're in flow on a piece of work, you can suddenly look up and you've been there two hours. Three hours, yeah. Because people don't realize there is no time dimension in the brain. Yeah, yeah. But the brain exists separately. So if you're just in very high flow, which is why we see these ADHD kids, autistics kids, etc., they just they really can just sit there and they get agitated if you because it's a very pleasurable experience to be in this very intense, singular moment of just knocking it out of the park. Then when you disturb them, that's why they get agitated and irritable. But they literally have not moved for you know, I had I had a young lady in the other day who told me she was doing 14 hour days, and I said, But yeah, as if it was kind of she was a hero for doing it, you know. I'm I'm just a I'm so bright. I'm so bright I can do it. That's a whole nice no. Yeah, you know, and

Dance And Tiny Daily Movement Habits

SPEAKER_03 19:10

by the way, you're in my room because you're about to burn out, and that will take a long time to come back from.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yeah, I mean that's a whole nother story. Um I want to bring up dance because it comes up often and you're and you're quick. And how how is it different from regular movement?

SPEAKER_03 19:23

Why do you think it's uh because it's rhythmic and coordinated and it's usually to music. So you know, this is why we love music. We integrate our auditory system, which is listen to the beat, uh, but then you orientate the m your movement towards it. And it and what's interesting is it's universal across every culture. No matter how separated cultures are, there are certain things that constantly coexist. It's really interesting. And and dance is one. It's a form of play, it's a form of um mate finding. You know, in my day you went to a disco, you grooved it down, and you know, it's you like the moves, you know. You know, you kind of cut some grooves, it was potential tick the box. I went to festivals last time with my kids, and I was quite horrified actually, how much they weren't dancing together because they're usually off their heads on something, which is which actually dissociates them. So they're all standing there looking at the scene and doing this too media, but they're not actually engaging. They might as if if in fact the entire crowd disappeared, I don't think they'd have noticed. Right? They're just then they're in the zone, fine. But it's not reciprocal.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

There are moments where I would love for this to be a video podcast. This was one of them. Unfortunately you missed out on.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

It was, it was just this pointing at the sky and looking up as if there was something there, but not they weren't aware of anything around them.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

Um they had to get to the mosh pit for it to become more interesting. But I think it's uh no, it's it's it's a it's a it's a whole set of movement patterns that you do to music, it's sensory input and it's motor output that I mean in its basic terms, and we enjoy it. And also it keeps you know we've done exercise incidentally.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Um and you see, I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, I I think to your point about even hydrating, if you're running to a tap every so often, then you have to go to Lou as well. Those tiny little things are making you move all the time.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

Well, a good example is if you look at I used to work in gerontology, old old people down in Australia, which I was dreading actually when I went there, but I actually adored it because of course you'd meet some fascinating people with amazing eyes. But what we found was one of the things I managed to do very quickly is a lot of them got urine tract infections, which to an old person is catastrophic. They also tend to go lulu, you know, they suddenly they cone off and they think they've had a stroke and all this sort of thing, and they get constipated. The heart of all of that is dehydration. And the main reason for it was that the nurses were taking them a jug of water, but they wouldn't drink it. Right. Because they didn't want the effort of going to the line. And it's mainly old ladies with dodgy knees, right? If I had my way, I'd love to get hold of Armati's Shanks, okay, the greatest makers of loos, and say, just make them four inches higher. Nobody will notice, nobody will be upset. But actually, when you sit down with dodgy knees or dodgy hips or dodgy backs, right? It's just like, oh, that's nice, I haven't had to go quite so far. They literally won't go to the loo.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

So I was I was And mini hacks can be super useful.

SPEAKER_03 21:53

I was a tyrant about it. And we within less than a month, I actually made it a sackable offence. So I said, each each day. Somebody somebody was on hydration duty. So one nurse had to go around, do the drugs, but they also had to pour a glass, socialise with them, talk to them, and then they had the old old ladies had to drink a glass of water and put it on their heads like the army, right? To show that they drunk all it. And we had we had a uh an 85% drop in UTIs, constipation, etc. Um, and um they were gobsmacked by it, and that was just water. Right. But you know, if you're if by the time you get to even feeling thirsty, you're you're a minimum of 10% dehydrated. You should never get thirsty. And this is part of the problem. Look at London, okay. I was saying to somebody the other day, the Victorians were amazing. They had all these parks for people to perambulate and mix and match and show off and that's but most importantly they had loos, they were nicely attended. Ladies could go off into one and men, it was it was nice and clean and smelt nice, you know. Now we've seen the end of public public lavatories in this country, basically. So now, and I have a lot of women who one of their biggest problems is that they're dehydrated, and even my own wife was oh, I won't have that coffee because it'll make me go to I go, that's the whole point. It's meant to, you know. But they're now having to set their plan of the day. Press a mangier might let you remember, they get a bit pissed off, you know. People don't and pubs are always moaning that they're loser being the same, people are sneaking in. Well, that's because we're not providing the facilities, but it has a health effect.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

If it's that simple, if remaining hydrated can cancel out a whole set of needs for medication. I was just going to go into pharmaceuticals for a minute because I know you have an opinion about the money-making element of all

Stress Symptoms And The Pill Trap

SPEAKER_01 23:25

of this and how actually well drinking water or all fasting or something like that doesn't cost anything.

SPEAKER_03 23:31

Um 15, 20 years ago, I said the moment we let biopharma uh and biotech companies into universities and medical schools, we were that was the beginning of the end. Because you saw the loss of autonomy, particularly of professors. Because they were very clever what they would do is professors, there was never enough budget in an NHS, they couldn't afford the research. And they might be doing fascinating work, but they couldn't have, they didn't have we didn't have the money to develop it. So you rely on a drug company coming along and saying, that's interesting. Very often what they actually say is, well, look, it is interesting for multiple sclerosis, but that's never going to make us any money. But it would be really good if you did this because this is a bigger market. And they would just shift them off. That's why all the neurological conditions basically have could have been cured. I'm convinced of that by now. There probably would be a vaccine for most of them. But but they haven't because they have very low incidence. The number of cases each year is actually low, but they have very high prevalence, which is there's lots of people around with them. And they're a burden to the state and to their family because they're disabled. I don't mean that negatively. These are kids these guys are really struggling. And um but they're never going to make a drug for it because there's aren't enough people to treat. And if they did, it would be a £200,000 tablet.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

My question was more about this idea that it's easier for a doctor to prescribe a medicine than go a little bit deeper to your point and check out lifestyle. I'm very careful to blame that the NHS is burdened with an unnecessary amount of things that you think could be fixed just by lifestyle, just like preventative work.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I think when we look at blue zones, they're a good sample to look at in this case. Nobody's running on treadmills, and not many people are taking very advanced medicines. They're just living life in a way that is quite active, that is quite socially integrated, that is quite nutritiously diverse. Uh, you know, there's various different sources here. Now, there may be genetic components there for sure too, but I think the lifestyle components show pretty clearly. It's definitely not the gym that gets you there, or that it's the medicine exclusively that gets you there to the high 90s or 100s.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Well, it's being outside all the time in the just basic movement.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

It's not about the treadmill necessarily, it's about getting up and getting your water once in a while.

SPEAKER_03 25:34

I I would put it in three ways. First of all, if you look at probably 65% of the symptoms that will present to a GP, they're a stress-induced symptom. Yeah. Yeah. Gastric reflux is a stress response. Yeah. Uh headaches, migraine, back pain, you know, all that stuff that ends up with the GP. Yeah. The poor GPs, who I don't blame for this, because I think it's very easy to blame them, is that they are partly their training doesn't really integrate looking at lifestyle, family stuff, etc. They think they're not psychotherapists. But you know, you don't have to be that old to understand you can help somebody if they're in a difficult marriage or whatever and say maybe this is what's driving it. You know, just put it, put give them the seed, as it were. But they've got seven minutes on average to assess a patient. Yeah. Now, in that time, that patient's um probably waiting quite a while to see you. They're they can be very aggressive. You know, I want this, this is what I have a right to, it's all that stuff. Um, and it's very easy to reach for the prescription pad and give you a medication. The problem is you're not careful, depending on what they come in with, you can start layering those medications. In general terms, if you're on more than three medications, you don't know if you're dealing with the condition or the side effects of the drug or the interactions of the drug, as we call it. Yeah. And then that becomes a problem. And you just keep layering them up, and then they you might see another doctor, and they haven't seen that you're on this or they don't play the private and public system against each other all the time. But I think also um there was a very, very good study done probably 10 years ago now in the States where they took a huge cohort of patients of different age groups. So I think it was 18 to 20, so it's a five-year annual. And they looked actually uh prospectively and uh retrospectively over all of the medications we give for the chronic illnesses, so heart disease, cardiac disease, lung disease, etc., obesity, everything. And they simply said of all the medications we do over 12 years, what has the best outcome? And they were horrified to find that no medicinal input gave anything better than the 43% outcome. The only one that did was uh muscle strength and ability to move, eye physical exercise. Okay, and they were 75%. So you kind of brut, you know, and these are this is why movement is the answer. But it's so much easier just to take a tablet, right? Yeah, and so and so, and then and people, and of course the drug companies are very happy to give it to you. And the opiate crisis in America was a really fantastic example, right? Because opiates actually don't relieve pain, they take away caring, suffering. Now, if you live in a huge part of America where I remember going, you know, and I'm tracking, so seeing miles of grid system where there's really not much going on, you drive to your map to the mall, you drive to the tennis court, whatever, and then you go home. There was no cafe culture, there are no ladies walking down the road chatting to each other with their with their babies, push chairs. I mean, it's really conspicuous. That's a bleak place to be. And if suddenly somebody gives you a medication that only takes your back pain away, but actually suddenly, mmm, you know, back pain's gone, but this is quite nice, right? I'm not I'm not suffering anymore. But you need the argument is you need to care because it's the thing that drives you forward. Yeah. This is crap, I need to be here. But that's what got hold, and that was because of course it's a private system. NHS, we never had nearly the biggest opioid crisis we had here because it was very tightly controlled. Yeah. Yeah. And they couldn't, the drug companies couldn't input to say, look, we'll give you incentives to prescribe this medication.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Let me take us back. I asked earlier why we

Interoception And Trader Performance Under Stress

SPEAKER_00 28:35

don't really feel all the stuff that's going on under the surface. I want to bridge us to introsception here. Yeah, yeah. And uh you worked with hedge funds and would love to kind of go into that world a little bit and tell us a little bit about the work that you've done with the hedge fund and how that kind of correlates to introsception.

SPEAKER_03 28:53

Sure. I mean, interception to define it, it's just it's just how aware we are of our internal state and and our and our bodies, actually. I mean, just what how so pain would physical pain would be a good example of that. Um if you take it from the from the neuroscience level, the we know that the hypothalamus, which is a very interesting part of the brain, sits as a little bead right down at the b at the top of the spinal cord. So it's clearly getting all the sensory input. Now that will be temperature, it'll be touch, vibration, orientation, etc. And what it's doing, and it has lots of little nuclei, and they're just m they're just look taking all the information about, they're making decisions. What it will then do is say, okay, let's take thirst again. I'm a bit dry. You know, because don't forget, we are a mass of biochemistry, right? We shouldn't really exist because we have this internal state, and every single cell has millions of chemical reactions going on and they all interact. Uh, there's a very nice poster by Roche, actually, who they've produced, which is now the summation of all chemical um biochemical reactions that go on in the cell. And it's it's it's it's I mean it's it's 50 times the tube map. I mean, it's 50. I mean, it's literally, and what you realize is that when I plop in a treatment to that cycle there, it's literally connected. So it's literally as the Chinese would say, Japanese, you know, you pop it, you pop the pebble into the pond and you just see the ramifications everywhere else. So, in a sense, as a side an effect, an acceptable side effect is where all those ramifications are being felt, but they're bearable, and I'll just put up with them. But they're all still causing, it's like a little cosmos. You take the moon out of the cosmos, right? Everything moves very slightly. So the hypothalamus is measuring that at very high, very high resolution. It just can't bother you with it because otherwise you'd have to have a head this big, like the Mekong, you know, the starcher, you know, he'd be this big because we don't have to pre-frontal cortex to make millions of decisions. Your body, your body, your brain knows exactly what your left left little toe toenail's doing. It's that high resolution, and that feeds back up through the system. And it's about where once it passes, some a lot of it is done in the spinal cord. So actually, you know, if I touch a hot pan, I will very quickly reflex the because the input has been so high uh that I will just reflex. That doesn't the brain won't even get the message. If it's really badly burnt, because now the tissue's significantly damaged, then that then the chatter will continue and then it's referred up north. And in my book, I I likened it to the CIA, right? So you you're right down at local level. Um, we've had a few local local issues with the locals, but we know we're with the bureau's dealing with it and it's fine. And then suddenly, boom, big bang, you know, oh shit, feed this back up to Langley, and it goes straight back up, right? And it's there are a series of decision levels. And if that hierarchy, if it gets high enough, then we really need to think about it. Right. And that's how pain, it's like chronic and acute pain works. But interception is is most people, if I said to you right now, particularly if you're a bit worked up or stressed, you know, can you tell me roughly where your pulse rate is? I'm not looking for a number, but you'd say, yeah, it's high. It's boom, boom, but I can feel it, right? And we know we have moving organs. 73 spot on. Um, but that's you know, and people, and in fact, some of my traders, interestingly, are able to tell you that. They're very fit, they're very intensive. And by the way, they're all neurodiverse. I mean, they go from very mildly ADHD right through to very quite seriously autistic. But that's their talent because they can spot patterns in markets. They're looking at millions of figures and seeing things happen that you and I just would have no idea. We just sort of move from one to the other. And if you add in IQ, which is ability to process, then this is a very powerful human being for cognitive processes. Um, they're not necessarily so good at taking risks, which is quite interesting, being it because it's because it's stressful. They're often focused on the downside. But I was very lucky to have a quite a long conversation with Danny Kahneman, because my boss um arranged it. And that was interesting because he wrote this book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Yes, I know. Um and I, it was quite intimidating because you know he's the he's the Nobel Prize winner in behavioral science. But what I said was that in the trading floor, that the when traders become stressed, they default to what all humans do. It's personality independent, which is that you will flip into a stress response. And the stress response switches off your prefrontal cortex, which is your decision-making centres, and you go, it's a race to the bottom of the brain, as we say, right? And what we found was their search algorithms, which is how do I see the world, they would go from seeing opportunity and potential in the market, ideas, creativity, to I'm only going to focus on the things that can take me out. That's what we call negativity bias. And that was very clear that was happening. And so we did um a study with 60 traders and we deliberately stressed them with a market that's very, very volatile, unpredictably volatile, because they like a bit of volatility and they ride the hump, as it were, but they couldn't. And what we discovered was that when we asked them for a mood score, how do you feel? They said, Oh, yeah, I feel fine, yeah, coping, I don't do stress, it's fine. But when we physiologically measured them, which is impedance, breathing rate, and so on, we found they say, Yeah, well, your body's telling me something different. And so they were, and what they didn't realize is that their subconscious brain had flipped into what we call negative search algorithms. It was beginning to look at all the reasons why I shouldn't. So they might see a trade, but they wouldn't take it.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

So the lesson here being that if you're more in touch with the ground truth of what your body is actually sending you, you can reassess your judgment.

SPEAKER_03 33:44

Yeah, if you if you read yourself, you know, know yourself as best as you can, because we read 99.6% of what goes on the brain, we have no idea about. And that's quite scary because we think we are, we think we own control of everything. Yeah. But and and interestingly, there was a very good paper that showed that traders who did have higher levels of interception, it directly related to PL, profit and loss. It was positive if they didn't. So it's very interesting. People who are very involved with themselves, and they tended to be the guys who did look after them. So they love a workout, you know, they've been stressed, they'll go and manifest in the gym. It's one particular guy I can think of, and he was super fit and whatever. And he had the best interception by far, and he'd been doing it, he was 50. You know, most people will burn out by then, but he was still knocking the trades out, but he was very clever at uh and he was very exacting about how he made decisions and would learn from them, and was you know he his rigor was very keen. How can we get better at this? Uh, very good question. I we are at the moment looking at the profile of traders, and I've said that I'm not sure that just doing psychometric testing is actually very valuable because it's not a psychological. I would certainly ask them, do they play poker? I want somebody, it's much easier to take a risk taker and teach him to regulate himself. Okay, so you can bet on the horses, just work it, take longer to work it out, dude. But he likes taking the risk. Interestingly, we've shifted more recently to taking in what we um very bright uh engineers um and uh physics mass people. And um interesting that they're they're quite guilty of what we call analysis paralysis. So they will overanalyse, won't make a decision, and they won't take the risk.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

But say you say one of our listeners now, if they wanted to get better at interoception, you're focusing on the on the traders. You're saying just fail more and you're And men, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 35:20

So um I think if you want to get better interception, um meditation is very good. Um shut your eyes, meditate, focus, and just feel. You know, sit there and say, How do I feel? And you quite quickly can say, I'm a bit agitated. Maybe sometimes say, Um, okay, I'm agitated. Why? You know, I've often said to a trader, he's oh I feel it in my gut. Okay, what does that mean? You know, a gut revisceral response is a physiological response. It's your brain telling you. Um, it's a bit like lie detectors is a good example, okay? They're sitting there telling you what they think is the best possible lie, but we're seeing all their parameters now. That's because of the lovely term I came up came across, which I thought was incredibly insightful, is the body will always resist the lie. Okay, it's bothered by it because a lie is a story, it's a false narrative, and our brain works on narratives. Truth is a lot easier. It's not it's sometimes hard, but it's almost always the thing to do, whether it's a marriage, whether it's uh I mean it doesn't matter what it is. Truth is actually very liberating if you can if you can abide by it. People aren't always comfortable with it, but it's usually the way forward. In this this case, the body, if you're having to tell a false narrative, you have to tell more false narratives. You've got to keep up with the story. Now that's energetically very expensive for the brain. So it resists it. So the body will tell you, I don't like this. This is an uncomfortable position. So lying is is that's why these detectors are quite reliable.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

Um So you're basically saying break the fourth wall with yourself, check in, ask why. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

I mean the reason people don't check in is because, as you've said, the brain is quite good at lying and getting in the way of and answering questions and uh creating a narrative that might be easier and energetically for the same. Sometimes the truth is what it needs to be. Yes, but but I think you've to somehow invest in your future self, haven't you? Because we all want instant gratification we're addicted to something and it's that dopamine loop and the that that you I'm I'm not a big fan of the marshmallow trick, but there's a version of that where you just have to get up and go and not think about it, in fact. Well, the definition of work in the morning, I don't think about it.

SPEAKER_03 37:25

I invest energy now or not to improve in the future. Okay, that's that's what work in a sense is about. So the the suffering element, if you call work that I mean, I enjoy my work, but if you do if you you have to put this work in, whether it's just lifting a box, you're lifting it for a reason in order for there to be an outcome goal. And this is the point about this is the wonderful thing about dopamine, is that the reason we're constantly seeking it, why we all want coffee and vape and stimulants, is because we're not going into, if you like, the suffering phase. We're not going back, it's like a seesaw. So we're not going into need.

SPEAKER_01 37:57

That I suppose that's what I'm aligning to is if I check in with myself and think what's really going on, I can find a myriad of reasons why I shouldn't go and do exercise in the morning, why I shouldn't get out of bed, or why should I and my brain's great at that. Actually, if I don't listen to my brain and I don't check into what I'm thinking, and my body just gets up and I start going down the stairs and I put on my trainers, it's happening before I my decision-making process or my prior decision.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Because you're gratified before you even move. I was thinking that checking in meant more check in your with your body, not with your mind. So the thing is, for instance, sometimes but my brain will lie about my body.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

My brain will find reasons to interception.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

That's what I'm saying. You need to learn interoception,

Anger Fear And Telling The Truth

SPEAKER_00 38:40

then, right? Because so, for instance, I'm in a meeting, um, having a conversation with a colleague. Colleague says something, I get angry. I tend to then want to like be loud. I check in with myself and realize my heart rate just went up. I'm kind of like triggered by this thing for no reason. I should probably check myself here. That's what I mean with checking in with yourself, and that's actually what the skill of interoception is. Not listening to your own blabber. That's not an interoception, right? Like that's actually just like chakras are basically about.

SPEAKER_03 39:10

If you look, if you talk to good psychotherapists who are emotion-based, um, I than attached, it's a it's a very powerful is that you know, you talk about an emotive subject, it could be the death of your mother or something like this, and and you think you think you've dealt with it. He said, he said, Yeah, I see you it seemed to touch you then. I saw a little flip, but you know, I touched you then. He said, You said yes. And and where did you feel it? It's kind of here. Okay. Now that's the heart, that's a tense heart. Okay. So you said I'm get angry. If you reverse anger, it's usually fear or sadness, weirdly, it but it usually tends to mask both. So am I angry or am I sad? Actually, I'm remembering my mom and yeah, okay, I'm sad. Okay, we'll sit with it in a minute. Breathe through it and just but let it go. Don't just go, oh, I can't think about that now. Let it go. Just let it throw it. Equally, why did you get angry with your mate? Because did he say something that was actually triggering for some other reason? Or was it this you um Brene Brown does a brilliant um little cartoon called Blame? And it's a cartoon of her standing in the kitchen. She pours herself coffee in the morning and she spills the coffee and she goes, Jesus Christ, Steve, right? Who's the husband? Okay, and you're thinking, What? You know, and Steve's got nothing to do with the coffee, but you know, she said, just pause for a minute, you know, and and it's she's just irritated by him at the moment for whatever reason is, and she has to play, you know, and it's just about really, is it very quick to twist out and blame when you like you blew up at your friend? Probably five minutes later, you might have gone and said, Look, I'm really sorry, I've had you having a crappy day, I've argued with the wife. It's all been crap, and it just I just vented because you just push on. I'm really sorry, you know, and that that's fine. And then people accept that, I think. But it's um but it's examining what it's made of. So, for example, nausea is very often sort of perceived. Um, there's a there's a there's a kind of there's a kind of sickness, you know. I feel I feel sick, I don't want to eat, which is actually part of a disgust module that we had, which was was burst around, I don't want to take anything on that's going to toxify me, etc. But it's usually related to other scenarios, values not aligned or something like that. Exactly. So checking in, as you say, I think that's slightly different to knowing interception purely is just what is my bodily state. But I think if yes, if it's manifested as something emotional that you haven't properly reconciled with yourself, then then that's kind of like where do I feel it and what's it made of.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

If I haven't slept well, I know I'm tending to want to eat greasy, uh sugary stuff. That's just this thing that is a fact. But that's what's a bad day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:22

Well, I'm angry. I said, what is anger? It's unrequited fear, unmanifested fear. Yeah, because sometimes I would like to just punch something. I know what those feels like, right? The traders, they'd like to go out and throw their keyboard across the table. They should and really they should be allowed to. It's inappropriate socially, but actually the moment they've done it, we all know what it's like to punch a pillow or you know, crush a grape, whatever it is that you can do. And you do just feel a bit better, you know. But it's um But we're not allowed to do it, we're repressed by it all the time because society dictates that this is inappropriate. So a bunch of punch bags on the trading floor would be. Oh, I've said on several guys, I'd have I've had one of those martial arts bodies, and I and I know who'd kick it, kick the shit out of it. It's our only female trader, she's awesome. And I think she'd I saw her the other day and they went, Claire, just go down to the gym now. You go, go and I think she'd have literally taken it apart. And we've all gone, Well, great to go, girl. You know, but I think that we've tried to create that culture, which in a lot of hedge funds is difficult because um you are kind of given a chair, here's your computer, here's your here's your uh trading floor, and uh go make money. And if you don't, uh piss off. It's and it's that brutal. And you'd never do that to a team. That's my argument. You'd never take any of the great players and and put them into into a team and say, right, come on, big star boy, go figure. You know, you you've got to nurture him, you've got to love him, you've got to and you've got to create the bonds between, and particularly if the cohorts are saying, Oh God, here comes Mr. Mr. you know, Mr. Narcissist, let's come on then, show us your goals. That pressure's, he'll just fail. It's exactly the same with the traders. So what we've tried to do is create a thing where a bit like the all blacks do, which is they have the very senior guys in the middle, you know, they've done it all before. They've lost millions, they've gained millions. But what these younger guys need is because they're very performance-driven, and when they fail, that they're in a hole. And we see that, by the way, they see their testosterone tank. It's absolutely fascinating. And what was really interesting about the study we did as well was that men, when they're winning, uh, whether it's sport, and this is what we found in sport, it's exactly the same with traders, they get a huge surge in testosterone. But testosterone makes you riskophilic, you like you want to take more risk, and that's dangerous. That's when we say that's when the devil comes for you. Okay, because now you're gonna do the next trade and think it's like you know, I'm gonna throw another six on the dice. Nah, it's no more likely than it was last time. But they will get they'll get complacent. And then so they like doing it more. I'm the big dog, I've just made out of half a billion dollars, and then they they hand half of it back the following morning. But what's interesting is that the cortisol they secrete when they then tank it, creates an incredibly slow doldrum effect. So they cut they take a lot longer to recover. What we tend to find in female trading is they tend to take less risk, they won't necessarily make as much money each time, but they tend to have a much steadier paced win win rate because they're not as affected by the testosterone. Um, the problem is the environment is, and I think it's you know, we get done by the diversity guys to say, you know, why haven't you got more wind on the trading floor? I think it's a bit like Why we haven't got more surgeons. I think it's um it's a place that suits male brains better, and I'll probably get shot for that, but there's strong evidence for that. I think that uh because it's kind of very win and fail, we're we're quite competitive as as a sex. And I think that um I don't think it's that it's dominated by men, I think it's just that it suits men's tropes better than female brains. If I had my world, it would be 50-50, and I think you'd see the big winners tanking and losing, but they were balanced by the the female profiles, which are much more consistent.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

We're talking more about brain chemistry here, right?

SPEAKER_03 44:32

Yeah, brain chemistry, and and we we know, look, if you look at huge cohort data studies, like the five trait character analysis is a really good one. If you look, men and women are actually most similar across about 60% of those domains. Yeah. Because each one, trait neuroticism, trait agreeability, they're all on a spectrum. And the two that most differently are agreeability and neuroticism. And neuroticism, you have to qualify very quickly because people think that means they're neurotic. Neuroticism in psychology just means I care more or worry more. And for various obvious reasons, women's neurobiology and physiology was designed around the child and the protection of the child, and therefore they were designed to worry more. So they are they are more intrinsically orientated to load on to trait neuroticism, as we call it. So it's thinking a lot more about emotional responses, the dangers in the world.

SPEAKER_00 45:16

Um that's why men start more wars, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 45:19

Much more likely. We do get sent off to fight the most. Yeah, that that too. That too. Um, but anyway, so if you look at that neurobiology and chemistry, it's quite interesting. And this is why when you do interviews, you've got to be so careful because if I'd done radio and things that you know, I say something I was on a mainly um women women's podcast the other day about pain, and and said, look, can I just start by saying I'm only gonna talk to you from a neurobiological and physiological concept? I'm not gonna start talking about social traits, etc. It's just not because it's just too dangerous, you know, the sensitivity is too dangerous. I'm just telling you, this is why female brains tend to do this and male brains tend to do that. And of course, there's huge amounts of crossover. But but that's and actually people were very accepting it, but I think you've got to lead them very gently down a pathway. It's like when I talk about pain, I know if I did it on the BBC, for example, every six weeks, that there would be a lot of quite angry people who are not whose pain has not been treated. And I'm those are the guys I'm most interested in, the chronic pain patients.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

And they're a typical brain.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

And they're angry. So if you if you say it's not in, you know, so I start by saying, look, it's not in your brain, it's not in your mind. It is not but first of all, I'll say, by the way, you are in as much pain as you say you are, I believe you. Let's take that as a baseline. So there's there's no doubt here. But it's not in your head, it's not in your mind, but it is in your brain. You've got to be articulate about it, because these words are so neurolinguistically loaded with meaning for people. If you say mind and head, it's like oh, we think some lingering. It's like, no, no, no. But it is in your brain, they go, okay, because that's where everything kind of happens, isn't it? So let's start with that, and then you can take them down uh a pathway, and usually they'll they'll play the game. But it's um and then you can help them, but it you've got to be very careful, and I think you've got to not make generalizations, nothing, but you know, base it in really good, as far as we know with empirical truth, this is the state. Yeah, and it's being corrupted constantly by kind of ideology around what should be better. Well, I agree it should, it just ain't gonna happen neurobiologically or in your DNA, because that's been there since 50 million years ago.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Because you mentioned Carneman earlier on. Um, do you want to answer that?

SPEAKER_00 47:12

The essence of the question is is the body more honest than the brain in many ways? Because you know, we have a lot of cognitive biases that we're not aware of on the surface. And uh we try to tell ourselves that we're holier than thou. But the reality is that we're not. And maybe the mind is much more deceitful in that way.

SPEAKER_03 47:33

Very loaded but also very expensive, multi-factorial question. I think no, I think you're right. If you if you could if you could sort of tap into the base of the brain, sort of just down above the hypothalamus and just take in readings from there, yeah, it'll tell you exactly what that you're lying like a complete, you know, like a cheap watch. But there are reasons you've got to filter that, you know. And also, again, going back to language, I've got very fascinated by kind of neurolinguistics and why English is such a fabulous language. I think it's why it is the international language, it's because it has the biggest vocabulary of all. And those were, you know, if I say to you, I think you're being I think you're being a bit disingenuous, right? And you go, well, I've just called you a two-faced git, but I've told it to you politely. It's what parliament's about. If I just call somebody a liar, it's unacceptable. Okay, and sometimes you'd like to. But it's about playing that game. I'm going to communicate with you, but I've got to deliver it. So I think there's a lot of there's a lot of filter. I mean, don't forget the brain is suppressing. Most of what goes on the brain is actually is suppression and filter. So for example, we're taking about 11 million bits per second of sensory information, but we're actually only processing four. So the brain is making a number. That's why we realized it's making predictions about the world and only updating that little bit. Yeah. It's not processing the 11 million bits.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Yeah, so what we are experiencing is just riding the very surface layer of like a lot of stuff that's going on. And the superpower is forgetting as well as suppressing, as a matter of fact.

SPEAKER_03 48:48

Well, it's for example, Parkinson's disease is a good example. When you lose dopamine in the particular substantia nigra, which is a tiny little nucleus, which orchestrates movement and its um its coordination and integration, much more than the cerebellum, which is normally which does it, um, they start getting the writhing and they can't sit still with this head bellismus as we go on. It's tragic to watch because what's happening is if I point at you right now, what my brain has said, extend my triceps, extend my finger, point. Okay. It's also said don't flex, don't retract. You see, it's had to inhibit a number of other movements. The problem with the with the Parkinson's is they're doing all of them at the same time. So the kind of the ones that you want kind of win over eventually, but this is why they get this terrible, and it's energetically so tiring for them. Yeah, it's a horrible disease. Um, but it's interesting to see because then you kind of work out, well, they're doing everything all the time, and that's just undoable. So I think it's um, and actually the prefrontal cortex's main main process is actually to filter. So, you know, I might want to call you a two-faced kid, but I will say inappropriate, disingenuous to be in most words. But you see, if if I've had a very poor education, this is why, again, if you look at some of the people who struggle in in therapy, is that they will say to you, even if they're in therapy about trauma in their lifestyle, they can't tell you, you know, if you say sadness, okay, or reject there's a whole subset of emotions that go with that. Why you say, well, I'm despondent, rejected, disenfranchised, all those lovely big words that we you and I can use. But if you're a young kid from a counselor state with a poor education, who's going through, you know, trying to uh verbalize, you say he can't tell you that. He can just say, I feel sad, or it's tough. They'll give you a physical answer. How was how I was being bullied at school? Well, it was tough. That's not an emotion. How do you know they really struggle with it?

SPEAKER_00 50:26

But I think the point that you're making, which kind of takes us back to the beginning, is that the mind also needs to have a map to ex to be able to express and navigate and understand this very diverse landscape of feelings and signals and things that are coming from the body. And if you don't have that, then the mind-body connection is also broken. So it's not all about the body, it's not all about the mind, it's about this mapping.

SPEAKER_03 50:54

It's about it's really how you orchestrate, integrate, and regulate your fundamental drives. Sex drive, fear, uh, two types of predatory, one's predatory aggression, one's defensive uh play. I'm trying to remember them all. But I mean, but they're there. So they're there as drives, right? Okay, as modules. And they're in you the moment you're born. That's they're a priori. We know that now. Then what you're gonna do is you say, well, no, I want sex. Well, it's like, okay, I can't just go and take it. It's unreasonable just to go and rape size. So that's where you build your ego of the world, then you build the superego, which is kind of my the limitations upon my fundamental wants. But a lot of that is your parents. And this is the work that dad actually had done for the family, the family division for family justice. He said, you know, we don't how can we dictate this? We don't really know. So we did these huge studies. And what we found was the biggest input was the the relationship with your mother, first of all, is very exclusive actually to men. It's it's really their face, etc., their stimulus, etc. And then it and it's all really about gratification. These, you know, you look at a baby, it just fundamentally wants feed. I need to poo, I need to do this, and it's gratified. And then dads come in at about two, and then they, and that's why they they go through the terrible twos, because they're separating from the mother, their identity from the mother, and but they've also learned how to go to their mum when they have when they have fundamental needs. So when you are upset, despondent, rejected by your friends, you you know, you run to your mum, mommy, mommy, he's uh he's unpleasant to me, and you say, Oh darling, you must feel despondent, sad, rejected. And and they don't realize subconsciously, they are going, oh, that's what this feeling I'm feeling right now is tick. That's how they build up that awareness. And if you look at a lot of kids that I've seen who come to me who who cannot, who are tense all the time, are now adults, they have a thing called alexothymia, which is a fascinating problem because it's not in the DSM as a problem, it's there as a symptom, but it's actually a universal problem. I've checked this with several psychiatrists and they agree, which is that if you have emotionally unavailable parents, boarding prep schools were quite big on this, which is that you are sent away by your mother, so there's a feeling of rejection in the first place, which you kind of suck up, but you're under constant threat because the seniors are going to take your bacon in the morning, or that you know you have no privacy, you have you have it's constant uptime, you're constantly feeling defensive. Then, and you can't go to mum when you're being bullied, or you can't go to mum when it is and she's she gratifies that need and tells you what it is, then you don't you don't attribute the label that you're feeling. So they feel it. And but they can't say, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry. And that comes to an adulthood. They're very calm people, but then they're just seriously non-manifesting, and they are the tightest guys you ever meet, and they can't let go. They don't, in fact, when they relax, they are agitated because being relaxed is not a safe place. And they just can't let go. Even if they do their breathing, I just like I'm not doing that, that's all weird.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

The thing um that helped me a lot was when you told me that I should do a lot of the breathing into my stomach. I I I'm I'm one of those people that you just described to an extent, not probably to the extreme extent that you're suggesting. Spectrum is like a Yeah, exactly. It's a spectrum, this tension, this uh not you know being more in my head and not actually being fully embodied, not really fully feeling. Um when I did focus on my breathing for three days straight, uh that was completely transformative. I did feel completely

The Five Seven Breath For Calm

SPEAKER_00 54:05

different. And you know, I I often think of you when I'm just like, okay, I should probably do a lot of like that tummy breathing now. I should do that tummy breathing.

SPEAKER_03 54:14

I was very lucky. I trained with uh Professor Boteko, who was the who's the father at the time was a charlatan. All the respiratory guys said, Oh, he doesn't know what he's sort of, because he said asthma is a stress response, it's not, and he's right. But anyway, did his train, could see the genius of it in the class. I said to him, This is really cool, and I want to learn this, and didn't realise how much I would get in over 30 years. Now suddenly, of course, it's everywhere. You know, so you sort of sit there going, Christ, I've been preaching this for 20 years, and everyone's going, wow, you know. The problem is there are a lot of breathwork guys out there who I respect, and even Vim Hof, but he got quite a lot of that radically wrong. Um, is that it's coached by people who don't understand breathing on kind of multiple levels because it's very physiological, it's very it's you can see the big barrel chests of guys who are holding their breaths all the time. So it's about mechanical, but it's also about gaseous exchange in the lungs, but it's also then about how the biochemistry in your blood changes, which is then has a feedback forward system on your brain and why basically you go into a subconscious stress response. They don't know they're doing it. So, and then they they look for the negative. So do you see what I mean? It manifests the anxiety state.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 55:11

The key thing I say to people is if you want a default process to do, because 90% of people are just stressed, right? They're just they're just neurologically switched on all the time, they're holding their breath like you are now, right? Okay, and then they are hot, they're breathing through their chest, etc. Just do the five-seven. It's that simple, which is in for five, out for seven. The reason for that is when you breathe in, the sympathetic, the stress part of the nervous system switches on. When you breathe out parasympathetic, it switch it, you go into a relaxatory state. And it never ceases to amaze me. This week I've probably seen a hundred patients, uh, 90% of them I've taught breathing to, but also when you get them to do the fifth breath, seems to be a magic biological number, with the long out breath. I'll say, in a minute, you'll hear your stomach go. And then and they go, there you go. And I said, by the way, do you suffer with IBS much? You know, that sort of issue. Oh my god, I've had there you go. Your IBS will go if you keep doing this. It's a switched off. So what you've just listened to is the vagus nerve switched on. So the vagus nerve after five breaths, for some reason, it's a magic number, it just switches on. And then and you just say, and I said, Look, feel your heart, your muscles, they're hard. Yeah, right, remember that. And they do five or six of the breaths, and I go, now feel them. And they go, Oh my god, that's so I said, Yeah. You are firing all of your what we call the deep motor units. You are preparing effectively to run or fight 24 hours of a day. Yeah, that is energetically, it's 30% more energy wasted. And so you can just use that breathing, just check in with it. The key ones are sighing, yawning, and breath holding. So when you're in flow, when you're attending me, for example, you'll notice you're holding your breath. And that's attention. But attention comes with its input of I've got to attend, I've got to process, I've got I'm running a podcast. I mean, it's it's it's full on. So it is a kind of stressful moment. But you if you observe it and you improve it probably only 30%, it it's radical. And they all come back with less digestive problems.

SPEAKER_01 57:00

But the meditation is the yeah, the sentence, the com the sentence that will keep us cognitively engaged so that our brain shuts up and the invasive homunculus.

SPEAKER_03 57:11

So if you basically um particularly because I deal a lot with neurodiversity, meditation they don't get on with because it bores them. Literally five minutes, like, oh whatever. Even just counting the breaths, they'll get to five and then they're off in lala land, okay? So what I actually was the great tip from a neurologist over, she's wonderful, and she said she said, I really fine this works. Do the breathing. So five, seven, all through the belly, nose only. Okay, do the first five, so you're in a kind of more relaxed state. Then say to yourself in your mind's head, okay, in your voice, simply say the sentence, I wonder what my next thought will be. But say so, say it three times, I wonder what my next thought will be. I wonder what my next thought will be at that kind of metronomic rate. And it is extra- I've done it, and when I'm kind of overwhelmed, it's been an emotional day, etc. And I'm like everywhere, I just sit down and do it. And it and by about the third or fourth repetition, I can actually feel the external thoughts knocking on the door of my it's extraordinary going, listen, listen, listen. I'm going, I wonder what my I wonder what my next and then suddenly they don't. It's like the wolf at the door, he suddenly just gets he's had enough. And I do it for sleep, and it works amazingly. And you suddenly think you didn't even know how many times you've done it. But it's also amazing because you have no temporal space in there at all. So I thought I'd been doing it for five minutes the other day, and I looked at my watch and I've been in it for 10, 10 minutes, and so I'd actually just gone into this wonderful place. And like coming here for the podcast, if I'd been rushed, etc., I would have just sat outside and done it for five minutes because I've got to have my my focus and I've got to and there's too many things going on in my life elsewhere. Just use it, and it's extraordinary. But the reason it's important is because it's a complicated sentence. If you just do an um, okay, there's no thought in that, you can just do it autonomically. But if you think about a complicated sentence, it could be anything you want, really, but it's just I wonder what my next thought will be. Right? The wondering is the process that actually blocks out the thoughts, and it's it it's for me, it's been a game change, and I've talked uh given it to several patients, and they all love it. So there's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 59:03

It's good to have a little tool takeaway. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 59:07

Awesome, Meg. Thanks so much for taking the time. My absolute pleasure. There are some good takeaways for our listening.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

Thank you so much.