If You Always Feel TIRED & LAZY, Do This Everyday To CHANGE YOUR LIFE! | Andrew Huberman

everybody has to learn how to do this your whole life gets better learning to control your nervous system will change everything if you get good at doing five minutes every day that's where the magic happens starts when things start to change it'll certainly make a difference to your alertness during the daytime but you're also strengthening those circadian rhythms which are so important for our health [Music] one very effective tool and this is actually in use in china pretty widespread now is if people have a hard time focusing remember that vision that cognitive or mental focus follows visual focus so if you're going to sit down and do some work and you find like i can't concentrate i'm not i'm not i'm like getting it i can't get into the writing or i can't do what i'm doing very simple practice it's been tested you can take a piece of paper um put a little crosshatch on it put it at the distance of your computer and force yourself to bring your vision what we call a virgin's eye movement to that location try and hold that blinking as seldom as possible as you can for about 60 seconds you've now adjusted the aperture of your visual field but you've also changed the aperture of your thinking right in doing that and this is very different than if you were just to concentrate on like the feeling of touch on the tips of your fingers because as you do work most all work requires vision and then the work that you do you'll find exists in this kind of narrow tunnel and you're able to rule out distractions quite a bit better that's one of the reasons why this device is so terrible i mean i fall victim to this too but if you have your phone every two seconds you're looking at your phone your visual attention is darting all over the place so there's a lot of clinically legitimate if you will adhd that we've brought up on ourselves um and so you can use visual focus as a as a training tool um i i have a simple meditation i do in the morning i call it a meditation but it's really just visual training i can explain it now i don't think i've described this anywhere that anchors several of these practices i actually will close my eyes and just concentrate on my internal state something we call enteroception and i'll just breathe three times then i'll open my eyes i'll stare at my hand or something at about a distance of arm's length and i'll focus my visual attention there and breathe three times just for sake of time keeping then i'll look at foot in the distance and i'll do the same and then i try and go into panoramic vision even if i'm indoors and i'll breathe three times and then i bring myself right back into my internal landscape i'll focus on a little crosshatch and usually then i get to work and so what am i doing what is this wacky practice well this wacky practice i just described is stepping through each as we call it sounds abstract but space-time bin of the visual system the visual system can orient to now it can orient to the future it can orient to the past mostly to the present and future and so this stepping through visual attention systematically what i'm doing is i'm training my system to adjust to these shifts because throughout the day life is a series of shifts between one thing and the next and the next and the ability to transition between these and then lock into them and then transition into the next is what makes us effective and this might seem a little abstract but if you try it what you'll find is that transitions between say work in a conversation or um dropping into work very deeply become much easier and there's there's reason there's no biological underpinnings to this um it's this is a forced practice it kind of mimics what we ought to be doing all day long the problem is is that the interference of of most of smartphone communications is that we're constantly being bombarded with content new context after new context that's what's really i don't think there's a as much problem with the content on social media although that's a debate you know there's uh there too obviously you want to protect kids and so forth except that when you're on social media it's the equivalent of watching 50 movies in two minutes because you're scrolling through and context switch context switch contents the human brain has never been confronted with this even if you have 200 channels on the television it's very rare to just go channel channel channels the whole idea of social media and by the way obviously i participate i teach on social media and i consume social media but you're just you're context switching context switching context in in a very passive way and so what i've tried to do is create practices that are grounded in the neurobiology of vision and how vision anchors attention and and can induce calm and the practice that simple uh practice i described what it does is it gives you the power and control to shift your visual attention to different things as opposed to some external stimulus shifting your visual attention for you and it um and i find it i've been doing this for about eight years now i do it every morning and sometimes in the afternoon and what i find is that it's allowed me to be far more effective in the activities that i'm engaged in and transitioning between those activities and my lab's looking at this as a from the you know experimental um perspective but i just thought i'd put the tool out there because again it's zero cost there's yeah by all being safe etcetera i love it it kind of sounds like training a muscle in the gym is going to allow us to well do many things but lift heavier things be more strong and robust in our life for whatever which one to do and it sounds like this kind of four-part process of you know focusing on you know things at different distances it it kind of feels to me as though this is a process that's helping adapt our visual systems to the way the modern world is now because the model world ain't changing any time soon so it sort of feels like this this might have been a practice that maybe wasn't necessary a hundred years ago 50 years ago but it is now highly necessary because of the environments in which we we find ourselves in that's right very well put and you know the the smartphones and internet are delivering experience in at rapid speed in ways that the human brain just simply didn't evolve to contend with now the human brain is great at dealing with new technologies creating new technologies what i'm describing are are very basic practices that are designed to offset some of the damage but also you know it's not just about avoiding problems it's also about being functional you know i i think that everybody wants to be mentally healthy physically healthy and perform well in their various activities um and we do that by engaging the intentional systems and then disengaging the intentional systems everything in terms of learning whether or not you're a child or an adult is a function of being able to lean in with intense focus and then lean out and access rest of different kinds in fact i know we're going to talk about a respiration but neuroplasticity the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience is what aside from the fact that the nervous system anchors and coordinates all those actions of the body the nervous system is so unique in that it can change itself but unless you deliberately force specific changes onto your nervous system the passive consequence of living in a particular way will also change your nervous system and not necessarily for the better so excessive light viewing at night not getting enough sunlight not getting enough movement i mean the nervous system will atrophy or change in response to whatever you give it that's the beauty of it for better or for worse and so what we're talking about here is is leveraging the this incredible capacity of the nervous system to change and saying well what are the simple zero cost low top very low time investment tools that are going to allow me to um be very effective as i transition from one stage of life to the next and you know i i'm a big fan of a lot of the work that's happening now in the clinical setting i should say around you know for you know various compounds to improve plasticity or to open plasticity or some of the i i know that the pharmaceutical industry gets a tough um rap and i agree that there's tens of this kind of default to pills mentality is not one that i subscribe to um i think lifestyle factors are extremely important i should mention that i do think that for a number of people they are so depressed yeah or that adhd is so severe that the idea of doing the sorts of practices that we're talking about is kind of overwhelming and that's something that unless someone has really been in those states it's really hard to empathize with but so we should keep that in mind but for most people i would say 90 of people out there these are practices that we can simply do and we get an immediate benefit but in addition to that we get a cumulative benefit because as i mentioned before these are slow integrative processes so the day-to-day and across the year it accumulates and then there's a third benefit which is neuroplasticity which is that your nervous system becomes very good at doing the things that are best for it yeah so this is the the systems of the brain they're responsible for being able to rest or being able to de-stress or to focus those systems actually get stronger so that your default is to be able to rest more easily when you need to rest to be able to focus more easily when you need to focus and so on and so that's unique it's not just about putting pennies in the jar you know putting smaller small coins into a jar you you could say well eventually you accumulate a lot but it's more than that those small coins are actually in the neuroplasticity model are actually being converted into a much more valuable currency by way of that action and so then what you find is after six months or so of doing some of these things you feel much better all the time and if you miss a day or two it's no big deal that's the that's the idea i love that i think that's just a great way to put it um and i guess there's that wider point that the the environment around us is affecting our nervous system it is changing our nervous system whether we want it to or not so why not be intentional about some practices that are going to help strengthen it or or improve its functionality in a way that we want and before we get to respiration and breathing you know one of the one of the things i've heard you talk about before andrew which has always um struck in my mind probably because i subscribed to this view as well is you've said this almost all of the unfortunate things that happened to us in life is down to a poorly regulated nervous system i wonder if you could speak to that initially because i think that really helped set some context for why vision or breathing or whatever it might be why it's so beneficial yeah so the um like let's take stress for instance we hear a lot of times that stress destroys our immune system and nothing could be further from the truth i mean stress is actually the way that your immune system knows that it should turn on let's just think about the ways that our species got to where we are there were long periods of time with bad weather cold babies that were undernourished etc many of us are familiar with working very hard in school or just generally working hard or taking care of a loved one and then you stop doing that you finally get rest and all of a sudden you get sick why is that well because we have this incredible system whereby mental stress and physical stress causes the release of adrenaline epinephrine depending on where you live in the world from the adrenals right above which side right above our kidneys and adrenaline is the signal by which the immune system decides to employ killer cells um anti-inflammatory cytokines or and also inflammatory cytokines which can be beneficial for wound healing and things of that sort so the activation of the stress system in the short term is actually very good at keeping us healthy i'll just point to a practice that many people now do which are cold showers um deliberate cold showers for three minutes a day you know three minutes every uh two or three days taking a three-minute cold shower and then it's fine to get into the hot shower or um doing what we call cyclic hyperventilation which is just okay both those practices you might say okay what is powerful about a cold shower or cyclic hyperventilation well there's nothing actually powerful about the thought directly hate to tell people this it's that they cause the release of adrenaline and in excellent studies peer-reviewed studies it's been shown that breathing of that sort and we can describe it in more detail or the cold water exposure the cold exposure creates this adrenaline release which then creates an ability to resist infection of different bacteria viruses and even fungal infections a dramatic result but it shouldn't surprise us because we have a system that we are still the we are here and we are the curators of the planet not the house cats or some other species because we have the capacity to lean into challenge and resist infection heal wounds and that is all by adrenaline and the release of adrenaline is mediated by the nervous system now when things go bad for instance people with chronically elevated adrenals they're drinking coffee all the time and working like crazy not getting enough sleep psychological stress they're not shutting off that system then you start getting into chronic health issues right because the stress system can't be chronically activated for too long or else you run into issues but the nervous system coordinates that likewise for people that have anxiety we have to say well what is anxiety well at a biological level anxiety stress trauma fear and ptsd are all the same thing it's ruminating on thoughts but it's the release of adrenaline in a very unregulated way and adrenaline has a primary effect which is to make us want to move or speak it biases us towards action it's the quaking of the hands it's the quaking of the voice it's the quickening of the breath it's the dilation of the pupils uh of the eyes which um sort of counter-intuitively creates a constricting of our visual field it takes us out of the past and future and puts us into the moment so that we can you know identify what's going on so the idea is to take basic practices in in the case of this discussion practices that mainly anchor to vision and respiration and learn to control adrenaline release and the timing of that release learn to control it is a three it essentially has three components one is you can increase adrenaline release and there are times where that is beneficial and we talk about that then you can come off the accelerator of adrenaline release and then there's a third component which is to slam on the brake and shut down the adrenaline system and the ways to do that are uh you could people try to do it pharmacologically they drink alcohol they drink coffee has opposite effects on the adrenaline system obviously they use uh sedatives and opioid compounds um but they also do things like take vacations or do meditation or um get massages which are all wonderful the meditations massages and vacations are great however those all require that you step out of life you know i love getting a professional massage but the professional massage is like 190 which frankly even at my stage of life i always feel like it's great but you know it's a considerable investment i'm not going to do it every day i don't have a masseuse in my home and to be honest it requires that i not do something else being a functional human and a functional human on any kind of budget means that you need to be able to turn on and off focus and relaxation and stress and so forth in a way that you are in control of that and so when you start learning how to control your nervous system it's tremendously empowering and i don't think that people should not take vacations um or not get massages or whatever it is but the ability to control your nervous system in a dynamic way in short time scales on the time scale of seconds on the time scale of days on the time scale of weeks that's what leads to really terrific work and school and relationship and sleep and exercise practices i just simply can't think of any other route to it for instance there's no liver detox that's going to do that there's no gut microbiome fix the gut microbiome is very important by the way for reasons we could discuss and as you know and know more far more about than i do but there's no one tool or pill or potion or practice that's going to allow the whole system that is you to fall into place whereas if you learn to control your nervous system from the standpoint of attention focus relaxation and sleep and you use the appropriate tools to access those then you find that everything else works better yeah and that those additional tools of yeah i am a believer in certain supplements i also think you know people should eat fermented foods to improve their gut yeah and reduce the activity the inflammatory there's great science to that but that one practice isn't going to change everything it's going to help but controlling learning to control your nervous system will indeed change everything your whole life gets better and mentally and physically the idea learning to control your nervous system i think is one that we should just pause on because you know sometimes in life we'll want to up regulate our nervous system to i guess perform a certain task other times in life we'll want to down regulate it in my experience and i'm sort of my bias is as a clinician what i have seen is that at least the people who come in to see me are usually struggling to down regulate a lot of them that they've taken on too much we know this is a big problem you know chronic unmanaged stress burnout taking on too many things not actively prioritizing relaxation that's a big problem so you know maybe we can talk about some of the things that well first of all would you agree that actually that's a key skill and one that actually is potentially not as hard as we think to teach people and then what are some of those practical tools that we can use to down regulate our nervous system yeah well first of all i completely agree and even if i do agree and even if i didn't you'd be right because you're the clinician not me right um well really and i should say i have tremendous respect for the clinical fields i mean i like i'm on the school of medicine side at stanford i don't teach undergraduates i used to be at an undergraduate university but so i'm in the medicine side and um and i think that chronic stress is is a major issue um and stress stress makes every neurological i know we said this earlier but it's worth paying attention it makes every everything worse when it's chronic and stress when you can take advantage of the mechanisms of stress and leverage them it's tremendously empowering i mean i will even say that i mean clearly you're not an example of this but there are a lot of physicians who are very unhealthy i mean this idea that scientists and and doctors are healthy i mean just look at most of them right no they're not taking good care um and so that is not i'm not poking at them what i'm saying is that everybody has to learn how to do this um there's a there's a truth which is that we are generally compensated in life for the degree to which we can lean into hard work and effort but a lot of people learn how to hit the accelerator and as you said they never learn how to decompress so a big part of my lab's work has been to develop zero cost tools that people can use in real time to adjust their levels of stress and calm down quickly so we can talk about those tools and then we've also been developing tools that people can do as short practices separate from uh real life meaning like a five minute a day practice that will what we call raise their stress threshold so that their trigger point to become stressed is further away and the first practice which um is based on work that goes back to the 1930s actually so it's called the physiological psi physiological size um are something that we all actually do about once every five minutes so in sleep or in wakefulness every five minutes or so we take a big deep breath and we don't realize it but we do this and dogs will do this right before they go down to sleep humans do this why do we do that well there are two main uh reasons why we breathe one is to bring oxygen into our system and then oxygen it's beautiful system it actually you know it fills the lungs and then as we know it moves from the lungs into the bloodstream and our cells require oxygen and then exhales we discard carbon dioxide and we need carb oxygen and carbon dioxide of course for our health um every cell relies on this uh you you wouldn't want to get rid of one or the other entirely the the stimulus to breathe meaning the impulse to breathe is because if you have a small set of neurons in your brain stem that detect the buildup of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream so when that level gets too high you take a big deep breath and then you offload the carbon dioxide that's actually why you do the physiological size to discard carbon dioxide as a consequence you bring in more oxygen now here's what's interesting that lungs are not just two big bags of air they have millions actually hundreds of millions of little avioli little sacks and when we under breathe or when we are stressed and when we over breathe so either way those little sacks actually deflate and because they have fluid inside them because of surface tension they are they are not um easily reinflated and so we're actually asphyxiating ourselves we don't have oxygen and we're not able to offload carbon dioxide bad situation the physiological side that i recommend that people do when they're feeling stressed anytime or any place i suppose unless you're under water is to do two inhales through the nose back to back the first one is a big long inhale and then the second inhale you're only going to be able to sneak in a tiny bit of air and then a long complete exhale through the mouth so it's so it's a very sharp little second inhale after the first one you almost feel like you couldn't get any more air in but when you do that second inhale you reinflate the avioli of the lungs you snap open all those they don't break and then when you exhale you offload the carbon dioxide doing that just once sometimes two or three times but just once we know from data in our laboratory and other laboratories will immediately reduce your levels of stress and anxiety immediately it's the fastest approach that i'm aware of to de-stress far faster than trying to tell yourself not to worry certainly far faster than telling you or somebody else to take a deep breath it's this this double inhale through the nose exhale through the mouth is a very efficient way to bring in oxygen dump carbon dioxide and re-inflate the avial of the lungs so that in the immediate moments afterward you're breathing more naturally and more calmly so it's a you know i don't like to use the phrase of like power tools and this kind of thing because that's not the business i come from but i think if there were one tool um that i would like everyone to do would be the morning light viewing but the other two i'd love for people to have in their kit is this physiological sigh and as i mentioned you do this spontaneously in claustrophobic environments people do it during sleep when um they are developing apnea um and then when when we cry or we observe someone crying watch how they recover their breathing after sobbing because sobbing is mostly exhaling and then there's a like a kind of a like a reverb reverberating um inhale so big inhale second inhale through the nose just squeeze in a little bit more and then long exhale through the mouth and that one has saved me and i from the feedback i've gotten that saved many many people many many times and it can be done essentially anywhere is it's up in some ways a reset for your nervous system things are getting out of control tension pressures building up and you instantaneously can sort of reset it back to baseline is that a way that we can think about it yeah think about it as a break on the adrenaline system think about it as because when there's elevated carbon dioxide in the bloodstream the brain registers that and sends a signal to your adrenals uh oh we're running out of air you need to move you need to get to someplace else in order to not asphyxiate and so this is why the the signal is so powerful now i think that there's there's another aspect to this which is that when our minds are racing out of control it's very hard to stabilize our thinking with thinking i always say you know trying to control your thoughts with thoughts is like trying to grab fog it's very very difficult so when your brain and your mind and your thinking aren't where you want them to be you need to look to your body to to recalibrate your state of mind so that then you get a new vantage point to view whatever it is that you're happy to be contending with mentally i actually had this it happened the other day i've been dealing with it with a set of issues that are kind of chronic and ongoing and it's a slow grind and it's it's working out that details aren't important or relevant here but um it's something i have to think about a lot each day what i'm gonna do how i'm gonna handle this situation and i noticed i was on the plane and i was feeling pretty stressed about this and you do a couple of these physiological sides and then what happens is you're able to still parse those thoughts but from a different perspective it's much easier to look to the body readjust your state of mind to a calmer place and then be able to analyze something cognitively than it is to try and prevent yourself from thinking about something which is very hard and in many cases we need we do need to think about what's stressful i mean this is something we don't often acknowledge people think okay we're going to go meditate we're going to take a vacation we're just going to step away we're just going to take a deep breath all sounds wonderful right but many times the thing that we're stressing about is is critical to our well-being it's important that we be able to think about this stuff so use the body to control the mind and place the mind in a better vantage point that's the idea yeah i really like that i think it's so powerful for people and i think so many people will hear that andrew and go yeah you know when i feel anxious and i do some yoga or i go for a walk around the block you know i just don't feel the same when i come back you know you you are literally changing the way you experience life through that action and i wanted to talk to you about something that again i've heard you speak about many times which is the idea that um you know grounded in neuroscience that it is actions and behavior first thoughts and feelings seconds yeah um i definitely believe that we should put our actions first when it comes to taking control of our mental and physical health and performance i want to be clear that i don't relegate feelings emotions and thinking um i'm i've been open about this before but i'll be open about again i've through a lot of effort of my own and through great expense and challenge i've i've been doing analysis for many decades i uh got into this because i had i was a bit of a wayward youth and i was forced to do it at first i so i just want to point out that i i wholeheartedly believe in the value of therapy cognitive behavioral therapy exposure therapies talk therapies i think we are a social verbal species and there's tremendous value to journaling tremendous value to thinking and to feeling our feelings however feelings are complicated and they can become their own trap being able to parse a hard emotional problem or being able to think about life in a way that's um from a good stance as a kind of a i like to think about the stance of the nervous system more than the state because a stance allows you to move in different directions whereas a state implies that there's one ideal state to be in all the time which of course not i mean there's a time to be stressed angry sad in awe devastated i mean that's life that's actually what makes for a rich life but the ability to be in a good stance around all that means that when we are in a state of deep sadness or deep confusion or great happiness that we know that we will eventually transition out of that state and that's a manageable um idea that we're going to transition in and out of these states one of the hallmarks of mental illness of different kinds is that people have horrible feelings and they feel like those horrible feelings are going to go on forever that's one of the things that leads to suicidal depression and or chronic anxiety as people are you know told we're always told you know don't don't think about the future don't think about the past just be present well what if your present really is awful that that doesn't help much so the reason that i'm a fan of physical tools is the following orienting towards action first and physical tools is the following first of all there is no fossil record whatsoever of the things that we feel or think none your feelings and your thoughts actually are pretty meaningless in the long run but what you do and what you say has a profound impact on you and other people second using physical practices allows us to communicate with one another about tools thinking is tricky i don't know what i'm thinking excuse me feeling half the time how do i know what anyone else is feeling you know i have a colleague in psychiatry who says this most of the time we don't even know what we feel exactly much less how someone else feels and so if we were to enter a dialogue around how we're supposed to feel and control our feelings well now we're really moving into the realm of wishy-washy nothingness because i can't tell you what to do or how to think about something but when we're talking about physical tools and using the body to influence the state of mind or the stance of the mind then we are we can talk we know if we're doing the same thing two inhales followed by an exhale panoramic vision light viewing these are tools that everybody can access yeah and so it creates a whole different conversation i also believe and i've had a lot of experience with the fact that there are times when things can feel so overwhelming and we are so back on our heels that we have to get outside of our head and the best way to do that is to get into physical practices that the imagery i like to use is that any moment we are either flat footed forward center of mass which is kind of leaning into life and feeling strong or we're back on our heels many people wake up back on their heels many people feel back on their heels a lot of the time so the question is how do you go from mentally and physically back on your heels to flat footed stance and sometimes and maintain the ability to go into forward center of mass how do you do that well you do that by controlling the this basic system in the body that we call the autonomic nervous system that's a bit of a misnomer because autonomic means automatic but you can think of it like a see-saw that on one end is our ability to get into states of alertness and focus and at the other end is the ability to relax and get into states of calm or sleep or um deep rest or focused but relaxed maybe the even seesaw would be focused but relaxed and so much of the being functional is the ability to move from alert to asleep because sleep is so key for our health of course or from sleep to getting up and getting outside and exercising but a lot of people get trapped at one end of the seesaw or the other chronically activated or chronically exhausted and the notion of a seesaw is important here because it's not so much about your ability to be on either end it's about the tightness of the hinge of that seesaw what i'm talking about are tools that allow the seesaw to be calibrated so that it's very easy to go from sleep to alert from alert to relax from relaxed back to work as opposed to getting locked in one position that's really the key and so i i realize this is all i'm talking all in an analogy now but i think it i'm hoping it's worthwhile because we've heard so much about mindfulness which is a wonderful concept we hear about mental health we hear about physical health but it's never actually been defined what is a mentally healthy person right usually when we're talking about mental health we're talking about mental illness so to me a mentally healthy person and a physically healthy person is somebody that can be in action when they need to be in action can relax when they need to relax can focus when they need to focus and can sleep when they need to sleep that's a pretty darn good life and you can go you can get a lot done and you can have very effective relationship to yourself and others with that kind of ability and that ability is anchored in the nervous system it's it's kind of nervous system flexibility isn't it it's that ability to adapt and utilize your nervous system in an optimal way depending on what you need at any given moment i think that hinge analogy is great and and sort of just to just to sort of follow up on that andrew i totally agree you know if someone is stuck in a negative loop or you know in a way that they're feeling there's there's there's nothing better than a physical practice to actually you know move them you know movement is by definition becoming unstuck right it's going to move thoughts feelings it's going to sort of mix them all up together so i completely agree i guess where i was going with it and i really interested in your thoughts on this is i have like you for many years been trying to promote healthy low-cost lifestyle practices you know i've written four my first four books have all been about this how you can inspire people to take on these things but one thing i've noticed um [Music] including with myself is that some of my patients would do all the the best lifestyle behaviors whether it's diets good sleep practices you know breathing techniques you know but there's still a subsection who was struggling because they would allow the thoughts or the actions of other people to negatively influence them and so for the last year or so i've been writing my next book which is really about trying to address this point of you know the way we think we we can change the way we think it's harder it takes time but we can train ourselves to think differently and so a concrete example let's say you were doing loads of great lifestyle practices you know what to do when you feel stressed and anxious you know you can use the physiological sigh when you need to and you're in a good place and then um your boss sends you an email that really upset you and wound you up so you want to comfort eats you want to have a glass of wine to de-stress yes you can use the physiological psi to calm yourself down and hopefully make better decisions because of that but i'm also sort of thinking about well what if you could also not get triggered in the first place by that email what if you could work on your mindset and change the way that you think so that actually you don't you're needing these practices to deregulate to down regulate less and less there are a couple things that come to mind and you know i am a big believer in uh the fact that well what i consider the fact that subconscious processes mainly brought on by our developmental models of attachment really act as a filter by which we engage in the world meaning um if you grew up with a narcissistic parent or an or an or an avoidant parent or somebody that had a quick temper i mean you would think the rational approach would be okay you're gonna do you're not gonna be like that or you won't seek out people like that but as we know that is not how it works uh freud was probably right about the repetition compulsion which is that we tend to engage in those types of dynamics over and over again his theory which i rather like is that we do that in order to offer ourselves new many opportunities to respond differently it's kind of an interesting concept um i i think that there i once i have a friend who's an analyst who i respect a lot who said that basically all of um freudian psychoanalysis can be summarized in a three box diagram with two arrows and that the first box says wish and then there's a then there's a little arrow and then there's another box that says anxiety and then there's another arrow uh to the right and then there's a third box which says defense and basically we have a wish we want something then we feel some anxiety around that wish and then we have some defensive reaction unless of course we identify what those arrows are and we understand the subconscious processes in which case we can intervene in our own thinking so this is completely separate from the kind of conversation we're having earlier where it's like do a physiological side the whole idea is to make the unconscious conscious and so the email from the boss that shows up you know we can think okay why do i get so triggered you know i mean oftentimes an email from a boss is pretty important uh and it makes sense to get triggered but can we maintain the kind of perspective of you know are we a pleaser are we a rebel are we a person that um like i for instance i i went into the profession i'm in because i don't like to be told what to do frankly i was like you know my own mother had a hard time controlling me when i was a kid and so i don't like to know what to do i'm not a people pleaser but the um there there are people pleasers and so you know how can we start to intervene with our own tendencies and see i think it's worthwhile i will say this um and now it's just my beliefs i don't have any laboratory data to support this but most people i would say 95 of the world does not do any hard ongoing psychological work to try and better them themselves and adjust their thinking sadly this is a matter of resource but it's resources and lack of resources but but most people don't so that means that 95 of the the misbehavior that we see in the world is coming from kind of untrained nervous systems and people are not super reflective i'm not i'm not being disparaging to them but i think that's the reality we also have to remember that and this is actually very useful for online interactions where people get crazy comments and things just when i first started teaching in university a colleague of mine who's a psychiatrist came to me and said just remember one percent of the world is schizophrenic has schizophrenia right um about four to eight percent are dealing with a bipolar disorder of some sort about 10 to 20 are dealing with anxiety disorders ocd he starts listing all of them off and then he says so when things happen and you're and you hear or see things that are that are concerning just remember to filter them through the reality of mental challenge and so you start when i get comments online and someone's being very aggressive i think to myself i'm like wow like they must be um struggling in some very intense way i think that and i say this a lit you know i'm smiling as i say it but but it brings me both a lot of relief for myself but also i think we need to acknowledge the sadness around this is that our species is is very flawed we're an amazing species but we're very flawed in that unless we intervene in our own internal processes uh we're apt to just shed our our inherited and our um learned and our innate dysfunction onto one another yeah so i think a lot of learning to adjust one's thinking is about the acknowledgement that most people are dealing with um a challenged nervous system to begin with and that it's a lot of work but well worthwhile to uh to be one of to try and make oneself one of the healthy ones when you look at a lot of the dysfunction and the despair in the world and a lot a lot of it is the consequence of people who just are not very self-aware and are not taking care of themselves or other people so i when that email comes in from your boss i wouldn't recommend you know sending them a recommendation for a you know a clinical seminar to help them get some relief but i often look at it and think wow it's incredible how um how angry somebody seems about something that you know is kind of easy to deal with or is kind of trivial um they must be pretty disregulated um they must have a really hard time regulating and and again i don't say it from a stance of of better than or disparaging i just think that we we are not very good at taking care of ourselves and it takes a lot of work and that's why i oriented the physical practices first it's like let's talk about concrete things to get into the stance so that one can then do the deeper work because the deep work is hard and it takes years even cognitive behavioral therapy takes a long time and so that's why i've oriented my public facing work more towards the things that everyone i believe can and should do i it's about adjusting the stance that we're in to be able to access the deeper work but i love that you're writing this book as you can tell um i'd love to share a meal with you sometime or a long walk um and chat about the psychological aspects and the of this and thinking because i mean that's at the heart of of how we experience life burnout we've discovered uh which is really common to executives today you know everybody today i think especially post covid um we found that if you have sort of a rather active recovery protocol in place meaning like you don't finish work and drink a beer and watch television you finish work and do go for a long walk in nature or take an epsom salt bath or a restorative yoga or uh infrared sauna get a massage or you know be smart about it so there's a recovery and regular access to flow those two things um and you're getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night we have discovered it's very hard to burn out it's almost impossible to burn out with those things what you said about burn out there really struck me burnout is super common yes in the executive population but i think it's i think it's common in in in all grades and whatever whatever your job status is i think we're seeing it i'm certainly coming across it more and more in my work uh and when i sort of talk for companies i'm seeing it everywhere and so what you said there was if i got it right it was uh regular active recovery uh regular access to flow state and seven to eight hours of sleep a night makes it almost impossible to burn out so let's just break that down when you say active recovery as opposed to passive recovery you did give some examples but can you just explain what the difference is because i think at the moment what i see in my patient population is many people will come back or they finished a long day on zooms at work if they're working from home and relaxation is the glass of wine and the television why is a more active form of recovery better what what does it do to our biology okay so um i am not not a fan of booze or tv right i'm not saying booze or tv are bad you shouldn't do them but what i will say is if you're interested in significant peak performance ongoing so when you finish the day and you want to relax problem with booze is once you have really more than like one glass or whatever it starts messing with your sleep cycles so you cannot get seven eight hours of sleep a night you're gonna start running at a detriment no pretty much instantly it's hard to make that up which is the problem with one of the big problems with those there are a couple others but that's that's one of the the bigger ones and then if you're drinking you know more than two or three um you're hungover right and and now you're now you're like now forget peak performance like you're hungover right like so okay so that's the problem with booze which is not like i like to tell people like from a snake shake the snow globe and go on vacation every now and again from your brain i'm fine with booze and drugs i really am like i've got no judgment i find they're very effective tools sometimes when you can't take a vacation you can't whatever but you just want to shut it off but there's a huge physical penalty on the other side of that and you better spend sleeping the entire next day you know than trying to go to work blah blah okay enough of that tv here's the problem so when for real recovery you have to spend a bunch of time you have to change your brain waves so brain waves normally are when we're awake and we're alert and paying attention to the world they're in beta it's a fast-moving wave right right now you and i are having a conversation with both in beta right if i crank beta up give you a high beta wave that's anxiety right underneath beta is alpha alpha is daydreaming mode it's where you're sort of going from thought to thought without a lot of kind of resistance underneath that is theta theta is rem sleep it's where you're going something the thing with no internal resistance right in rem sleep you know in in alpha you may think of a green sweater and it might remind you of a green turtle right like that you might predict but in theta the green sweater becomes the green turtle becomes the green planet becomes the green universe becomes the incredible hulk who's right it's just one at least to the next it's the next kind of thing flow by the way takes place on the border line between alpha and theta television you need what are all the techniques that you and i were talking about restorative yoga a long walk in nature um epsom salt baths what it like what all those do as a general rule they help flush cortisol and some of the stress hormones out of our system and they help kick the brain towards alpha alpha seems to be some time in alpha seems to be what we need to recover here's the problem with tv tv makes us feel passively like we're an alpha it makes you feel like you're relaxing tv even if you're dealing with like acorn tv slow british dramas right even then anytime there's a quick cut between things you have what's known as a salience network right this is a novelty detector and it's scouring the world at all times for anything new and novel and it's doing this because one anything new a novel could be a danger could be a threat might want to run away from it or could be an opportunity could be something to eat could be something to mate with right so we have a salience network it's hypertuned and as soon as there's a quick cut that's a novel perspective change oh my god novelty so even though you feel like you're chilling out your brain is going from alpha jumping up to beta every time and if there's any violence in what you're watching or anything else like that it's going to high beta and even though it feels like you're relaxing you're not so your brain is not recovering and if you couple the not recovery of television to booze and you do this consistently as your way of unwinding night after night after night you're not recovering at all regular access to your primary flow activity is sort of um part of that as well and i mean more than anything else to put it colloquially flow is when we feel most alive and right it's really hard to get through hard days hard times without that feeling now if people are working from home and for zoom there's other things we can layer into this that are sort of how do you you know survive in a crisis i can we can add on to that whatever but for burnout regular access to what we call your primary flow activity primary flow activity is that thing that you've done all your life it could be skiing surfing snowboarding rock climbing dancing to hip-hop dancing salsa playing chess walking your dog whatever it is everybody's got a primary flow activity and you want to double down on that um in times of stress for sure but you definitely want to um you definitely want regular access then this is key so we're talking about two things that busy executives or busy let's not even say executives busy 21st century citizens don't like to do right they don't like to play because we're adults now and we're going to put down childish things and i'm not going surfing and i'm not going to skiing and i don't get to go out and dance to hip-hop anymore because i've got an adult and i have a responsibility right i've got kids and i've got family and i've got you know i gotta put away childish things and it's just a disaster and it's the recipe for burnout primary float safety you get some great examples could this be for someone a 30 minute walk in nature oh yeah um oh yeah by the way the most common flow states on earth are reading you always know reading flow is so it doesn't happen usually happens when you read something that's a little bit intellectually challenging and makes you think so when your brain starts pinballing from idea to idea to idea like you're totally engrossed and then suddenly you have that insight and it leads right that that's reading flow very common so yeah this could be whatever works for you um and it could vary from week to week or season to season or month you know what i mean some months it could be you're learning to cook and being in the kitchen is the most flowy thing you could possibly do and some months it's playing with your kids and so you know like there's lots of activities here that work but you have to double down on it and the reason is this three things are really key one especially if you're fighting burnout or if you're just fighting crisis like cobit 21st century life right now um one as we move into flow stress hormones are flushed out of our system there's a global release of nitric oxide it's a gasoline molecule it's everywhere in the body it pushes stress hormones out of our system so you're resetting you're automatically resetting the nervous system this is another reason that primary flow activities are so important a to in crisis and b to pausing burnout because they flush the stress hormones from your system they reset the nervous system secondly the same neural chemicals that show up and flow besides performance enhancement pleasure they boost the immune system so you're getting an immune system boost you're resetting the nervous system you're getting an immune system boost um which is important for staving off burnout or covenant crisis as well here's the coolest part the increase in motivation possibly definitely increasing creativity we know this from work that was done at harvard these are massive increases by the way uh depending on whose numbers you're going for flow will amplify create a solving uh 400 to 700 percent it's a huge amplification and creative problem solving and that heightened creativity and this is teresa mobley's work at harvard outlasts the flow state by a day maybe two so one of the reasons this matters in crisis situations or burnout situations you want that creativity because it's how you get out of the bad situation you're in you need it right so you've got one state primary flow activity that's going to reset your nervous system boost your immune system heighten creativity and heighten motivation and generally increase overall well-being and life satisfaction that is so when when we work at the flow research collective we work with we work with everybody we train about a thousand people a month but on average they're peak performers now we could be doing these could be you know insurance brokers from delhi or you know stock brokers from munich or soccer moms from indiana like it doesn't matter but they're just interested in peak performance or it's us navy seals or ceos of fortune 500 companies and um here's what's interesting when i teach active recovery for example or primary flow activity these are great skills to be performers they require grit that's why in in art impossible i have actor recovery as a grit skill peak performers don't like to shut it down you don't want to stop you want to always go go go but the lesson here there's two really big lessons in big performance the first is your emotions don't mean what you think they mean the second is a lot of times you've got to go slow to go fast this is one of those times you have to go slow to go fast burnout is so costly any kind of kind of stress and anxiety is costly with burnout is so exceptionally costly to performance it will set you back so far that you just you have to stay ahead of that curve so you got to go slow to go fast yeah primary flow um activities how often do you recommend people access them because obviously it depends if it's skiing and you don't live near a mountain well you're going to struggle um like where it's a 30-minute walk in nature if you can get into flow doing that and i wonder where that comes into flow because if we have to hit that challenge um sweet spot where it's hard enough i can tell you how to do it i can break that down for you but yeah i mean get into flow any way you possibly can more important than your primary flow activity what we have found and i think it's first of all you got to start by starting right like if you've got 10 minutes a week then you've got 10 minutes a week that's what you're doing if you've got 20 great what the research seems to show and i think we need way more research on this particular thing um but the way research seems to show that about an afternoon a week is is sort of the minimal requirement now you can split that and then by afternoon i mean like three to four hours right now you could split that up half an hour half an hour half an hour right 20 minutes 20 minutes two hours however you want to do it that seems to be uh what works best but i think there's going to be a lot of individual variation i think it's going to change over time i think it's going to change with age it may be different men to women i i that so run the experiment for yourself but three to four hours is is sort of what we see and so for a primary flow activity how do you walk yourself into flow i do this all the time um i do this every day in fact um though uh so i start my day with a four-hour writing session i write every morning from 4 a.m to about 8 a.m um and then i take my dogs for a hike in the backcountry i live in the mountains and i just walk out the door and go off the mountain and um sometimes this is just an active recovery process i'm just going for a walk or sometimes especially if the writing was a real struggle right and it didn't put me into flow right usually writing will drop me into flow um but if it didn't and i'm really frustrated then i will do a flow walk so what's a flow walk we have something called exercise induced transient hypofrontality the temporary deactivation of the prefrontal cortex of the part of your brain that's right back here this is why all those strange things happen in flow for example why does time pass so strangely in flow when you go out and for a walk in nature and you walk depending on your fitness level about 20 to 40 minutes it gets quiet upstairs right it gets that shuts off now that's not flow but it's the edge of flow and you've now produced one of the conditions one of the major conditions that has to happen in the flow if you now want to so this can just go out for a walk 20 to 40 minutes now and you may want to time this ahead of time meaning because you there's a location thing that's going to matter here so you're not probably going to get this right the first time out but at the point that you tend to for me it's about i say 30 minutes of hiking uphill you know slowly with my dogs in the morning it'll quiet things quiet down once that happens you want to introduce some dopamine into the system usually the easiest way to do this i do it with risk i hike up a hill and then i run down the hill if you don't want to do it with risk or you want a lesser version hike into the forest and then just jog through a forest just weaving in and out of the trees is going to be enough it's novelty it'll be enough new visual stimulation novelty also gives you dopamine so you don't need risk you can just have novelty um unpredictability will also give you that dope means so take a walk into a part of the city that you don't you've never been to before where there's lots of novel things to look at that will do the same sort of thing and then i like to like or if that once you've got a little bit of dopamine into your system if you really want flow at that point um i try to exhaust myself i basically like what i'll do is i'll hike for 20 minutes go uphill really hard for five minutes and then run downhill for five minutes and then you're essentially in a low grade flow state so 20 minute walk i would make things more vigorous for like five minutes that's just to get a little bit of endorphins in the anime the painkiller right and then you want to introduce some dopamine so walk until it's quiet upstairs make it hard um but just for a brief you don't need to you don't need a lot of hard you just need like 30 seconds to a couple minutes just to get a little bit of pain natural painkiller flowing and then you want some dopamine and that is either um novelty or risk and anybody can do that pretty much anywhere yeah i love that and it's i mean the benefits i can i can just see it profound you know whether it's you're trying to deal with burnout just generalize stress whether you're trying to solve a problem and your work that you can't solve and you know maybe when you're out there you're going to fire up the default mode network so actually you know you know this there's all kinds of things also as you have you've written about the impact of nature on our neurobiology also right yeah um so um if you walk in nature right you're also getting you know additional benefits and if you walk in nature some place where you can fly really wide vistas to look at that's even additional benefits i can talk about the neurobiology under why why vistas and whatever if you care but like walking in nature where you can see far and wide it's really freaking good for you and it's gonna outperform pretty much any antidepressant in the market and then if you add enough flow hike to boot you're doing you you're doing some good stuff for yourself does it matter if you are listening to music and or podcasts when you walk and the reason i ask this is because clearly it's very very popular these days i do it myself sometimes but i've also noticed sometimes if i'm really busy in my head if there's been lots of i'm trying to process a lot of stuff let's say for writing and all these different ideas and i sometimes start walking with a podcast on i said i don't want all this noise i just want peace i want calm and and i'll either move to relaxing music or i'll take my earphones off and just listen to the wind and the birds or whatever so i think this is that's a great question so i think podcasts are you don't want you you want your brain um turning off right you need it to go from beta awaken alert down to the alpha theta borderline to get into flow you can only do that if you're not you're really using too much brain power or if you're reading you can get into reading flow you can concentrate like one thing but hiking walking that's going to be taking your energy and i think you it's a limited thing flow is a high energy state as it gives you energy or it takes your energy well both both it gives you a lot of energy but it takes a lot of energy so if you want to be in flow on a regular basis you gotta you know you have to hydration nutrition seven eight hours of sleep a night these things matter because these are high energy states right um so that that that's part of it uh as well yeah wow there's just so much so much to think about with respect to these things uh i wanted to move on to emotional intelligence it was a really interesting section in the book on emotional intelligence and what's the relationship between emotional intelligence and peak performance but then also what really struck me in that section was that you wrote about empathy and you said that empathy is an easily trainable skill now i don't think most people think it is i think many people think you're either born over there you're either you've you intuitively can be can can practice empathy with other people or you can't so that really just made me stop and pause and reflect a little bit so i wonder if you could explain a little bit around those those areas um emotional intelligence and empathy so uh let's start with emotional intelligence and um [Music] i like to be pretty ruthless about this now i'm an introvert i'm not terribly fond of most people i like animals better than people as a general rule um so grain of salt with what i'm about to say but if you're interested in peak performance two things matter one so i like to say that positive psychology has spent 30 years sort of outlining what are the peak performance basics there are cognitive basics and there are physical basics on the physical side we've been talking about uh you need hydration and nutrition to maintain proper energy levels you need seven eight hours of sleep a night you need a third thing on the physical side that people often don't talk about on the physical side which is social support when you do not have a robust social support network and i don't mean you know lots of people i mean you may know only a handful of people but they love you and you love them and there's a deep relationship there and you regularly check in why does this matter whenever you encounter a challenge right your brain says oh here's a problem is this a challenge or is it a threat now this is all day every day for all of us right you're always encountering stuff and you're like challenge your threat challenge your threat and when your brain makes that determination one of the things asks is hey you got posse because if you're solo man solving that challenge it's a threat and i gotta sound the alarm bell here's some anxiety here's some stress but if you've got posse you've got people around who love you help you we'll pick you up if you fall down or et cetera et cetera now oh wait maybe it's just a challenge and you can rise to the occasion so on a fundamental level social support emotional intelligence matters because you have to maintain remote robust social networks just to sort of be able to perform at your best more importantly at a really kind of mercenary statement between you and your dreams other people lie like it's just there's no way around it there are other people standing between you and your dreams maybe these people are going to be in your way and you're going to have to find ways to move around them um there are obstacles and maybe they're there to help you out and you can find way and if you can get along with them um you can really get farther faster but either way if you want to navigate that situation quickly and you really want to get where you're going emotional intelligence matters and to put it another way peak performance is hard life in general is difficult and if you're going after high hard goals right which is what peak performance is really about well it's going to be even harder why would you not train emotional intelligence it's i mean it just doesn't make any sense right it gives you better energy levels at a foundational level we know by the way that you know chris peterson has uh the positive psychologist who's at the university of michigan um has said that you can summarize 30 years of positive psychology in a single phrase which is other people matter right like that's what he's talking about we need other people we're social creatures we need other people and they're going to be between you and wherever you're going anyways what i say when it comes to emotional intelligence is first of all it's readily trainable right like i tell people to take an 80 20 approach to it right we tend to get 80 of our results from 20 of our effort so what really matters the most when it comes to emotional intelligence where are the things that where do you get the most mileage active listening right that means that when i'm in a conversation with you i'm not thinking about the cool witty thing i'm going to say next or that sarcastic thing you might have just maybe said so i'm just paying attention to you i'm listening to you i'm not judging you i'm not thinking about what i'm going to say next i'm paying attention to you and listening to you and when it's my turn to speak then i speak you're very passionate aren't you that if you fuel your body in the right way with the right foods that can make a big difference to energy yeah that's absolutely the case wrong yeah and it all starts from the food we're eating and obviously the output is energy and we're in january now right we're sitting here we're a couple of weeks into january and now is the prime time where we see a couple of things happening we see people embarking on new fitness pursuits so they're training a lot more than they ever have done and normally also they're going on diets and one of the things that we see at this time of year is we have to see people who are energy deficient who are walking around and this is a topic that's covered quite a lot in the sports medicine press over the last few years called relative energy deficiency in sports and it's something where you're expending huge amounts of energy but not taking in enough and eating enough and this manifests itself in lots of symptoms decreased concentration coordination irritability muscle strength and it can have more serious side effects too but i can definitely see in my practice at this time of year and all the conversations people are jumping straight into a new approach to either lose weight or look better as opposed to setting up a sustainable approach to fuel their body to then train harder perhaps and improve their fitness it's the wrong way around yeah no i like that do you think some of us are do you think we are training well not training too much but we we're changing so suddenly that we maybe go from nothing to two or three spinning classes a week because we want to get fit and lose weight but we're not proportionately increasing the amount of food that we eat because you know we're trying to lose weight so i'm going to eat less i'm going to work out more but if that's not done right you're actually going to really suffer from low energy is this something you're seeing quite a lot absolutely yeah 100 wrong it's it's something that i think people view the two sometimes in isolation and you know and ultimately the two go absolutely hand in hand and in synergy and it's just about gaining an understanding of obviously training in the right amount but fueling your your body in the right way and part of the rationale really for for the book and getting the message across with energy actually came from sport a long time ago and it came from working with combat sports athletes and this is includes people like boxes judo players and jockeys because they have to hit a certain weight to get on the scales so typically what we would see is a few weeks out from competition suddenly they've really reduced their weight so they have to hit that to get on the scales to compete the problem that we'd see is yep they can actually compete but when it would come to perform they had no energy wow so the one sort of key key aspect of this really for me is look it's it's no good looking great if you don't have the energy to deliver a performance and i speak to people every day in and around london and around the uk that's you know say similar things that you the focus is so much on looking good it's almost seen as we have to go through this period of hurting this period of feeling hungry it's almost a right of passage deprivation you have to do it you shouldn't have to do it it's not a trade-off you can fuel your body in the right way with the right foods and still maintain an aesthetic q1 it shouldn't be a trade-off and we've almost been taught it is a trade-off i think for those people listening who may feel well you know what james you've worked with these high-level sportsmen who are performing on the world stage you you've you know dealt with ceos and top businessmen who are looking for high performance a lot of people may may be thinking actually that doesn't apply to me but i guess i would really disagree with that in the sense that we are all looking for high performance in our everyday lives whether it's to perform well um on the school run whether it's to perform well in your relationships whether it's to perform well when your kids are back home from school and you want to play with them and you want to do homework with them and you want to actually mentally engage with them we need we all want high performance and i think sometimes the word high performance is associated with ceos and sportsmen but i think we all need to be thinking about high performance we do it it was wonderfully put and almost performance is a bit of a hard scary word sometimes and that's definitely approach i've had i think early on transferring to you know to clients i would see on the street you know they would say the same thing about how does this transfer and performance can be a hard word but ultimately that's what we want we a lot of us most of the listeners and most of the people we see each day in our practices they want to perform better in their jobs we're now working longer hours in the uk we have to perform better we have to be fueled to cope with these increased demands and you know it's the same with our family life as well and all we're trying to do really is to use nutrition to give our bodies the best opportunity to achieve what we can our own personal best so how do we do that so you know let's say someone's listening to this that they're interested in improving their nutrition but they don't know where to start and they've read um conflicting blog after conflicting blog and they've seen one person do really well on a low-fat vegan diet they've seen somebody else do really well on let's say a diet loan refined and processed carbs and they think well i don't know what to do i'm confused are there some basics that everybody listening to this can apply yeah i think there are i think there are definitely some rules i think we really have to knock a few uh myths on the head straight away longer than that we shouldn't be following an approach that gets rid of any nutrient or food group that isn't something that's sustainable that isn't something we do with our elite athletes so the highest performers on the planet don't use that approach what we do is we use different fuels at different times and we make this approach sustainable and you know i think firstly if we're diving into the science a little bit more that you're right there's been this almost debate in the media over the last let's say last five years it's really heated up in that what's the best fuel for the body should we be all high fat should we be high carb and we're constantly wrestling and actually our physiology hasn't changed much over the last 20 years we use both of those energy sources as a fuel yeah and actually our body at different times prefers to use different fuel sources when we're doing low intensity work walking around our body prefers to use fat as its primary fuel as soon as we're really increasing the intensity maybe doing a hit class or doing high intensity running we tend to see more of a shift towards using carbohydrate as more of a fuel but it uses both and if we feed it both it means we have a healthy metabolism so should you feed your body certain fuel sources at different times depending on what you're doing for example if you know if you've had a busy day at work and you're going to go and do let's say this spinning class or a circuits class ah you know in the evening on your way home from work is there something that you should be doing to make sure that you can perform well in that class yeah absolutely i really like the approach with that running as well because we're almost going backwards from what we're fueling for which is abs absolutely the right approach so we all need to think about when we're eating it's not just eating you know in a sort of habitual way it's thinking about okay what have i got going on today um what do i need to put into my mouth to ensure that i can sustain what i need to do today and the reason i'm asking that actually is particular because the last few months my wife has started to work out more and she started to do strength training which is not something she's she's really focused on before um and i won't say too much more to get yourself into trouble but essentially she's really getting into strength training now a couple of times a week but often she hasn't changed what her nutrition is for the rest of the day that's something she won't eat before she works out sometimes straight afterwards she won't eat and a few hours later she can really feel tired concentrate feel a little bit irritable and i see that in my patients as well because i guess in some way they've not thought about what do i need fuel for today that's it's really well put and we need to look at how we fuel our body over the 24 hours and there's a couple of really important reasons for that and just using your example with your wife and the strength training we know that if we're doing a resistance training or strength training session your muscles are still adapting over 24 hours later to what the workload that you put through them which i think is quite amazing when we talk about it it is so we almost know that in the 24 hours after you've done this this training session what you eat will have an effect on how your muscles adapt wow so you know i think for me that's really interesting and how they recover as well how they recover and yeah and how and how they grow and repair and obviously the key nutrient we look uh for for that is protein and i've termed this in the book the maintenance fuel and it's something that we need to make sure we have enough of in our diet over 24 hours but also now we've learned from the science it depends on the timing that you have the protein during the day because our muscles are in a constant state of flux they're constantly taking in new proteins to grow and repair and breaking down so if we can get protein in our snacks and our meals it just means our muscles are constantly in positive equity really protein is one that's obviously grown in the public interest in recent years and is really important because we know we have to hit a certain level over 24 hours to maintain our muscle mass and to maintain growth and repair for our muscles so i guess working with elite athletes i'm guessing that you have been quite specific with them in terms of how much protein they need do you think that you know a non-elite athlete um someone who just wants to perform well all day and be able to do a workout three or four times a week do they also do you feel need to won't say obsessively but do they really need to um [Music] you know measure and look at how much protein they're having or can it be a little bit more intuitive do you think it can be a bit more intuitive i i think with any of the things we're applying here even eating for energy or your protein for maintenance it doesn't have to be really rigid we're not talking about weighing food no you know that that's not the approach our elite athletes don't do that i really you know we don't wait you know they don't go home and weigh their food if there are specific examples where we need to be really prescriptive yes you know we'll do that and we'll write a very very sp specific plan but in most cases this is about getting the principles right with each meal yeah and then replicating these over the day and i think you know often wrong and i know we were talking about this earlier on i think often we try and overcomplicate the science and sometimes there's really some really cool fun science behind what we're doing but with the people who we work with we want to be dead simple so they can go into a restaurant or go down to the breakfast table in the morning and have confidence that they'll put the plates of food together and within the book you know what i've tried to do is you almost use this concept of building a plate and and how you build a plate depending on your demands so let's let's sort of walk through then how one builds a plate it's because let's take you know a middle-aged man or woman who's working let's say uh well let's take you know you know someone who's got a busy home life they've um you know maybe they've got kids who they want to get to school then get to work and maybe at lunch time they want to go and have a little workout at the gym so i guess how would they go about thinking about building their plates and i guess an additional question there might be they've got young children are there any of those principles that that they can also apply with their kids yeah absolutely i think i would start from the very beginning with this one good and i i i really love to lean on an example the rationale supporting this because we in every sports ground up and down the country and this was the same for us arsenal we would have your restaurant where your players would go and eat before and after training and typically what would happen is when they go into the restaurant the way that we set the restaurant up was that we had the different food stations with the different components and we could then give some information to players on how they should build their plate now the first station was always protein so the players would go in and choose their portion of protein on their plate now the second section was the fuel section looking at the slower releasing lower gi carbohydrates now this would really depend on some days preparing for a big session we'd be encouraging them to have a bigger portion of the carbohydrates but on some days we might be encouraging them to perhaps burn more fat or in other adaptations we would say actually we want you to restrict the amount of carbohydrates and then move on to the next part of the counter which is the protection foods which is the vegetables fruits and fats so actually fill your plate with more of these vegetables to complete that component and you call them protection foods why do you call them protection foods protection foods to maintain tissue health to maintain our immune system and because what the antioxidants or the phytonutrients that are contained within there yeah absolutely so and and the vitamins and minerals too you know like for example looking at things like vitamin c like you said the antioxidants folates and the different vitamins too and we often find that the protection foods the vegetables and the fruits are often things that are overlooked on people's plates we often focus a lot on okay well i've got my protein i've got my carbohydrate you know am i set and we often restrict the variety of these protection foods that have obviously a crucial role for our immune system but also for our tissue health too yeah i really like that and it's really um it's fascinating for me to you know it's really fascinating to think about what might happen at a big football club like arsenal so the players are you know rocking up they're going to eat before they train let's say and you know you've set it out like your protein station and then what's fascinating is that sometimes you'll encourage more low glycemic carbohydrate type foods yes but on other occasions you'll sort of restrict that absolutely which is really interesting because obviously about five ten minutes ago you mentioned about not restricting foods and i know um this podcast has you know you know a very loyal listenership around the world and there's a lot of different people who listen some people are advocates of a vegan lifestyle some are advocates of a low carb lifestyle and have found that actually if they restrict you know refined and processed carbohydrates and really go quite aggressive on that for them they seem to find that they can thrive in their everyday lives and lose weight whereas some people um love a vegan diet and they find that that's changed their lives and i think for me the commonality tends to be when they've moved away from you know what's called the standard western diet to a more whole food based diets people tend to improve you know certainly initially no matter what change they make initially that's certainly what i found in my practice as well and so what's fascinating with me is that sometimes your athletes who you're working with you will you know you will change their carbohydrate intake depending on what they're doing so what can we learn from that yeah i mean you've summarized that really well uh longer than that yeah it really depends on what you're fueling for it's the point you made before right that's the key i guess so maybe it's the low-carb approach for some people in the context of the rest of their lifestyle and in the context of what they have previously done with their food intake maybe it works for them and their lifestyle whereas somebody else for example it may not work for them i i think i i really like that well it it it all comes down to context right it all comes down to context because everyone is has different demands in their day and you know just like you said there'll be some some days where i'll advise clients to have a higher protein lower carb meal because for example they don't need extra fuel so what what might be a scenario where that might be something you recommend so quite typically then i mean let's we're in london now let's dive into the city okay and that's you know the typical person in the city they might train three times a week so on those days we know that their body will need more fuel from lower glycemic index carbohydrates when you say that just in case people who are listening to this aren't familiar with those yeah what do you mean by that oh so things like basmati rice wild rice whole wheat pasta quinoa buckwheat rye breads porridge oats okay there's a huge variety of options of these foods that we can choose so quite broadly we're saying well on a more active day where you're training more you should have more fuel but what happens on the day where you're going to work and you know one of those days where your days run away from you yeah you haven't had a chance to go to the gym we all have them that's how we should be shaping our fueling accordingly and it might be we get home in the evening and say well look i actually haven't worked out today my activity levels have been really low maybe it's time for me to have what we call in the book of maintenance meal which is bringing the carbohydrates right down having your source of protein and having your protection foods your vegetables but you don't need fuel if you're then going to be sitting around in the evening yeah that's interesting it's a lovely way to think about things about fueling your body for its specific demands exactly so um and and i like that and i guess with the book you sort of outlined different approaches that people can take i love that that's a maintenance meal as opposed to what a performance meal well we the the terms we use uh wrong and we use uh the maintenance meal and we use our fueling meal and then for people who have extremely high energy demands maybe you're preparing for your first london marathon or your first triathlon we would use a competition meal but most of the readers who are just trying to get a bit fitter and trying to look a bit better and feel a bit better we alternate between the fueling meal and the maintenance meal and then you can look at the context of your day and then your week and then you have the tools to adjust because i think too often we talk about nutrition it's almost seen as you've got a blank sheet of paper a static plan that's not reality that's not the world we live in you know we have to be nimble with our approach and have this approach that things may change you know you might have to go and do a show tomorrow a show tomorrow night or work during the day so your your energy levels might be up it's the same for the person who might i mean putting an extra training session into their week we need the tools to be able to fuel our bodies flexibly but before we can do that we need to understand and i guess what you're trying to teach people is yes give them you know an understanding of different fuel sources and what they're going to do for the body but i guess the hope would be over time they would start to understand what they need for their own bodies based upon the recommendations you initially make because ultimately i guess we want to get to the point where we start to understand what we need for our own bodies you know 100 i mean i was always taught within sport that we worked and upskilled the athletes your work as a practitioner you would work with the talent with the athletes and you would teach them about their body essentially wrong we would coach them it's like a coaching process the coaches do it on the pitch my role really was to upskill work with a chef to teach them how to cook get them to understand how their bodies recovered what an optimal level of body composition was maybe for them as well and then little by little you take a step backwards and you're on hand for the odd question hey james is you know should i do this or my muscle soreness is up is there anything that can help but the autonomy is you know it is passed into the athlete and it's it's the same process with this book what we're trying to do is to upskill people to take the scariness out of exercise and nutrition and say look hey look here are the fuels here are the different plates try them out see how you get on monitor how you're doing and you can refine it yeah well journey i think on that level it's just very it's very empowering and simplistic approach in the sense that you know you've got all that experience you have worked with some of the most you know high-performing athletes in the world at the highest level yet we can all learn from those principles because i guess what you're saying is actually what you're doing with them and what you would do with let's say me if i came to see you actually it's not that different it's about figuring out what are you feeling for let me help you do that absolutely it's absolutely the same it's just often a different rapper people have different context in their lives and we might you might face slightly different challenges but the science is still the same yeah our body still loses nutrients in the same way i'll tell you one thing you know just before we got recording today i was telling you that um i'm in london at the moment uh on a sort of book tour and every night this week i've got events in the evening so speaking about my book the stress solution and then i am you know doing a book signing afterwards and last year when my first book came out i didn't have quite as many events right and you know what i'd be busy i'd be quite excited about the events in the evening you know because i love speaking to people love meeting people and i found last year what i would often do is i wouldn't get time to eat before the events because i was doing too many other things right too many interviews and i realized that actually what i would do at the i'd be okay doing the events and doing the book signing but then i'd come back to my hotel and i'd be starving so then i would eat late yeah and i wouldn't sleep very well and say that i'd be exhausted the next day and you know just just a simple thing that i've learned between last year and this year is now i sort of blocked out in my diary before each event a 90-minute slot where i will eat before i go and it's a simple thing right it doesn't it sounds like so intuitive but and i you know i i'm sort of pretty obsessed with nutrition yeah and but i didn't really think about it and having gone through that experience now i'm now eating before all of these events it i think i'm performing better at the events because i've got a really nice uh you know source of energy throughout the whole evening and also i'm finding that i'm sleeping better because i'm not eating so late so that's just one example of how i've tweaked things from from last year and was it did you notice that quite quickly when you made that change and you said right look i'm gonna really focus on my nutrition before was the difference quite quick did you notice it was actually if i'm honest it was i've been doing that maybe i've done three events so far i've got 14 to do so still got a lot to do and i've been trying before each of these uh new events this year it's actually about a month ago i sat down and i thought actually it's a grueling schedule in january um i'm really passionate about spreading the word about what i do and trying to get around the country and talk to lots of people but at the same time if i don't look after myself i'm going to struggle and i'm going to start burning out and i reflect on what i did last year i've also noticed from honest james is that i don't know if and i'd love to talk a bit about food timing yeah i know for me on if many of my patients if we eat late it can often have a knock-on consequence in terms of our our sleep so therefore our recovery um i'm a big fan of um professor sachin panda's research from the salk institute in san diego talks a lot about time restricted eating now how we've got natural circadian rhythms and actually eating in harmony with those can be really beneficial why do you ask did i notice the effect quite quickly well because typically i'd expect you to say yes really and i think often there's the misconception with nutrition that you have to turn your your diet upside down or your nutrition upside down to see an effect on your performance but actually just changing one meal and seeing how that's gone can have a massive massive difference we had um we had an event a few weeks ago this was over at the barbican with a society of musicians and i think within the music industry nutrition still in its infancy and they were saying what's the one thing that i can change to have an impact on what we do in the evening when we're performing all around the world and it's getting your pre-performance routine nailed and i said i said okay everyone put your hand up if you know what you eat or what you prefer to eat before you go on stage and what time it is how many people give that some thought 30 wow you know so just with one one small intervention around what you're eating before and maybe what you're drinking if you're having caffeine anything like that you know you can have a huge impact on the most important part of your week that performance on stage and it's just a small tweak it's what's incredible is that when you put it like that it's obvious isn't it you think actually you know what i'm a musician i need to perform now for a couple of hours in the evening what do i need to do what do i need to fuel my body with to ensure that i can do that but for some reason we don't think about it like that um you know this was recently you said that was with musicians that's right yeah um one thing we spoke about before we came you know to record today is i've always felt that um [Music] you know premier league football seemed to be you know certainly 10 15 years ago seemed to be a little bit behind the curve in terms of nutrition they would seem to be focusing on a lot of other things but certainly that was my perception obviously you you're in it and you've been in it and probably one of the pioneers i guess in it in terms of working with arsenal because arsenal are well known for actually i think arsene wenger is very well known for sort of being certainly ahead of the game in terms of trying to introduce these ideas into the club um and it really does strike me as quite bizarre how we've not really thought about food in that way have we we've just sort of we eat because we're hungry or we're not hungry it's just a thing that we do we've not thought about what we're gonna put in for what we're doing afterwards it's our habits as you know especially in london are based on habit you know we we tend to wake up in the morning we'll have the same rushed breakfast perhaps go to that same coffee shop for the same sandwich finish work perhaps scramble around at the local supermarket to prepare our meals and it is it's based out of habit and one of the key things we're trying to do with the book really is just to break habits and say to people look this should be conscious and we should be tailoring our nutrition it doesn't have to be obsessive it just requires a little bit of thought you know and how by making a few simple changes to our nutrition to our energy plan we can you know achieve a bit more and have more energy to do the things we love to do so weekends um a lot of us if we have you know obviously working patterns are changing a lot now but yeah many people still have you know let's say a typical monday to friday uh office job let's say and they're not working at the weekends so obviously they might just be completely chilling and relaxing at home on a saturday or let's say to another extreme they might go out with their family or their partner and go hey we're gonna go for a long walk we're gonna go out in nature go on a little bit for a hike so i guess a lot of us will have the same breakfast on a saturday morning without any thoughts but i guess what you're saying is that depending on how we're going to spend that day that will also then um [Music] it will also influence the sort of breakfast we should be having yeah i i think so and again it just comes back to the the premise of we're fueling for the the demands of that day so if you are having a quiet day at home is that and you know you're not going to be particularly active is that the sort of day where you might want to have one of these sort of um you know protein-rich meals which are relatively low in carbohydrates because you're not going to be expending that energy through the day as opposed to when you're going out for a three-hour hike let's say you might go actually i'm gonna have more of these hopefully whole food carbohydrates in the morning with my breakfast is that the sort of thing you're getting at yeah absolutely i think if we're around the house each you know each day i think more of these maintenance meals you know the higher protein lower fuel type of meals would definitely fit and then we know that if we're going to go out for a big walk with the family or we're doing a couple of exercise classes or on the golf course we need to add more fuel so we might have a couple of fueling meals in our day to help support that as well like you i don't believe that you can be healthy by just focusing on one area of your health right and at this time of year it's very typical that someone will go right okay i'm going into the new year and i'm going to change my diet this year and i'm going to do something this january that i've never done before today get a new diet plan i'm going to stick to it i'm just going to change my life right heard that before you've heard that before and you know i've probably been guilty of that myself before right it's a i think it's a it's very common human traits to do that but it very much feeds into that all or nothing approach which i'm trying to move people away from but if we take diet for example sugar or the other one you could you could talk about as alcohol right at this time of year people are trying to reduce the sugar intake they're trying to reduce how much alcohol they're consuming and often first two weeks of january they'll go completely cold turkey right no sugar no alcohol right after a week or two they manage to do that and they're feeling good they're feeling you know they're sleeping better they've got more energy they can concentrate for longer but then two weeks in three weeks in it just slowly starts to slip back and by the end of january they're right back to where they started because maybe the diet or the alcohol wasn't the problem maybe they were maybe they were the way that they coped with the stress that was in their life let's say there was a lot of work stress or family stress right well actually a bit of sugar in the evening helps kind of numb that a little bit and helps soothe it it's a sticking plaster sticking pasta right and it's same with a glass of wine often um and i've found and i'd be interested in your view on this because you've got more experience than me as a doctor what is it now 22 23 years working i don't know actually a long time a long time yeah a long time yeah and and the point is is that um you've got to really understand what that is serving for that patient it's no good saying hey you're eating too much sugar you have to reduce it right well if we don't understand why they're choosing to do that in the first place is it psychological reason is it conditioning is that they don't know is it an education issue that don't know how harmful it is or is it a way to sue the stress in their life actually depending on which one of those things it is that will also alter the approach you take simply saying you've got to reduce your sugar without understanding why they're doing that you know what i just haven't found it to be that useful in the long term i mean what do you think i know i totally agree i mean i think behavior changes is is the key to this and understanding what makes you tick and i think reading through your book that falls out of this because people will think wait a second you know that is why i'm craving sugar at this time of day because whatever you know i'm stressed or they've had sugary snacks earlier in the day and they're crashing or they're relying on caffeine whatever yeah and that's why i put so many case studies in the book yeah to bring these ideas to life and say look well when i saw this patient and i'm really hoping that people and i know the people who've read the early copies love the case stories because they're great really good people can really often see themselves in those various stories and go oh actually that might be me yeah um but it says what 180 role can get from it if they want more energy like this book can give them that they want more creativity this book can give them that if they want to lose excess weight that they feel they might be carrying this book will help them do that yeah and why is that that's because i've looked at health in a rounded 360 degree fashion so we just said we can't look at one thing in isolation if we're going to make long-term change and i was thinking okay i had this idea for five minutes because i've seen over and over again that five minutes chunks of health are achievable and people can do them repeatedly in the long term and i'll give you a couple of um stories of where that came from if i'll tell you i'll tell you now actually um it's it's a funny dynamic actually chatting to you on this show because you are one of my best mates and it's um it's great it's hard to get out of uh i should be interviewing you you kind of i guess we are just having a chat aren't we and catching up yeah yeah but for five minutes right it's it's come from a lot of experience but also research so the experiences and there's many patients i could bring up here but there's one in particular i always remember um a 42 year old chap who came to see me seven years ago maybe now i can't quite remember exactly what it was but he was a little bit overweight struggling with energy and struggling with his mood you know a very typical patient that you might see in general practice i chatted him for a while and i felt that um his lifestyle was probably contributing in a huge part of the way he was feeling but i don't think he was quite aware of what he was doing that was contributing and also what he could do about it so we went through a variety of different things and at the end of it he really seemed to enjoy and resonate with what i said about strength training he said um yeah i'm in dark strength training i'm gonna do it i can see all the benefits for it and what would you like me to do 40 minutes three times a week at the gym and i said hey look that would be absolutely amazing if you can do that and he goes yeah yeah i'm gonna do it and he and he walks out off the surgery you know he's feeling good he's got a smile on his face and he's full of motivation right he comes back a month later at the follow-up and he walks in and i said hey look so um how are you getting on and his body language changes he's he becomes a bit sunk and his shoulders rolling and he's he looks a bit sheepish and he says hey doc um i've not actually managed to go yet because you know work's been really busy the gym is quite far away from work and my house it's quite expensive um so i've just not done it yet and you know i remember thinking i didn't think why is he not doing what i've asked him to do i thought rongan you've clearly not given him advice that he feels as relevant in the context of his own life and you know i took my jacket off and i said right i'm going to teach you a strength workout right now where you don't need to join the gym you don't need to buy any equipment and you don't even need to get changed he's like okay so i went through it with him i taught him these five moves yeah the kitchen workout it was it was like there's a series of one i mean that one was a combo well there's there's there's a new one in the book called the classic five which i i think are the best five bodyweight exercises that one can do without any equipment and i went through about 50 exercises to come up with those five um what was interesting is that i said to him then what i'd like you to do is do these do this five minute workout twice a week in your kitchen and um he's like what five minutes twice well like 10 minutes a week i said yeah can you do that he goes yeah of course i can do that i said okay fine i'll see you in a month so he goes out like probably a bit bemused that i told him to only do five minutes twice a week a month later he comes back and i say hey look how you getting on and he said dog i've got to tell you right and his body language was different right his chest is out he's standing up straight right there's a sort of smile on his face complete contrast to the month before when he comes back to see me and he says dot's chastity i love it i started off doing it five minutes twice a week like you told me to but you know what i really like it i love doing it so now i do it for 10 minutes every evening before my evening meal right so this chap now and he's been doing that for a number of years now at least four or five years after that he was still doing it so this guy now does 70 minutes of strength training every week when before he couldn't manage it and there's there's a few little keys in there for me which is when you make things simple for people and easy right they start doing it yeah right absolutely and once they start doing it for a few days what happens you start to feel good about yourself right it's behavior change on so many levels it's actually identity change because now he's not the kind of person who can't do a health plan he's the kind of person now he can do a health plan yeah because i said five minutes twice a week and he's done that yeah he's like well hold on a minute and then he increases it in himself not because i asked him to right but because he wants to and that's another key point for people is that nobody in the long term will ever ever do something because somebody else told them to do so right they might do for a week or two weeks but long term you're only going to continue doing something if you've got some degree of ownership on it and um that's that's one of the examples from patients where this whole five-minute idea was born because i've seen it work over and over again and the fact that he was doing more than you'd initially asked him he mentioned something called the ripple effect in the book which we'll come on to um but i'm going to make a confession i know that works because while you were writing this you asked me and one of your other friends to try it for two weeks do you remember yeah i do and i tried it and i noticed i felt less tired and a lot stronger and it was simple stuff that you do on the floor i remember sort of i don't know whether i'm allowed to share this but you sent a video of yourself doing these exercises i probably won't share that video on my social media but it was great it really worked you know you texted me a few weeks after doing that you said about your shoulder pain yeah had gone it had gone yeah for years that's right by doing the reverse fly which is in this book yeah exactly and and you know we mentioned one of our other friends who i won't mention their name because they don't want to be names um we know who he is we know who he is but i saw him this summer at the beach in devon like so he was there with his wife and kids i was there with my family and it was a beautiful sunny day and in one of your races did you we'd have one of our races no but he he was he was out there on the beach and i've known this guy for a long long time and actually i thought you know physically he looked really really good and i said hey mate you know what you're doing you look in great shape and he turned around so he said like all i've been doing is your classic five workouts for five minutes every day before i leave work and he'd been doing that for about two months right so i knew our friend really really well and just putting five minutes a day every day before he left work of a body weight strength workout that requires no equipment i could visibly tell a change in his physique now look the book is not necessarily about a physical appearance it's about it's about feeling good on the inside it's about um helping your your physical well-being mental well-being emotional well-being it's about long-term health and longevity that's that's what this book is about but let's be honest a lot of us like to look a bit better physically as well and i'm just sharing that because a lot of people would say to get that sort of physique you'd have to go to the gym for an hour four times a week but it's simply not true we we overly estimate how much we need we we sort of overly focus on those big unattainable goals and we forget that it's about it's about getting really good at doing the little things right five minutes a day on that strength workouts changed his physique but not only that so this guy's a good runner and he cycles regularly to work right and what else has he reported he says well if you wanna know he says that when he cycles to work he used to have to stop halfway up because he was starting up the helmet now we can go the whole way why because the exercises are working on his legs he's a very good runner he's now running faster and for longer since doing it so you know i'm just using that as an example to show that this program on this plan is for everyone now it doesn't just focus on the body right there are three sections to the body i was just going to come on to that so it's mind body and heart tell us a bit about how you came up with that because that's i think that just in terms of getting inside your head why is it those three okay so okay just to rewind back to when i sat down to write this book i was thinking okay i'm really really happy with the first two books really really happy with how many people have um have bought them and are using them to improve their health and their family's health but i thought well there's a lot of people out there who probably aren't familiar with my work or this kind of approach to health so how do you make it more accessible to more people i was thinking what is the what is the the biggest problem that people tell me when they come and see me in my gp practice and as we mentioned before it's time right people don't feel as though they've got time yeah so okay so what how can i help them understand that they do have time and i thought about every patient that i've seen and what works and what doesn't work and it's really consistently it's about when you make things practical for people um not just practical in terms of time perhaps concerns of how easy it is to do something we'll come we'll come on start later no doubts then people actually make the changes and before you know it they're feeling good and they're empowered to keep going so i knew i wanted to do it around five minutes because five minutes is it's short enough for time uh periods where you think yeah i've got five minutes to do this but it's also long enough where you actually feel the benefit and i think it's trying to get that balance because the only way you're going to keep doing something is when you feel the benefits yeah and so it's it's i think it's in that sweet spot from what works with people you know you can go lower than that and you can still create habits if you do start with one minute interventions you really can but for some people especially when you're trying to write a book that's going to appeal to a lot of people i think five minutes is the right amount of time for those reasons but then i also was thinking okay i like the idea of five minutes because i've seen that work with patients but then what actually how do you get that sort of rounded health approach with five minute intervals because as we've already mentioned i don't want to just focus on one area you know if you just do five-minute workouts every day sure that'll improve your health but there's other issues going on and i thought there's issues with our mental health our physical health and our emotional health right so how can i how can i really simplify that down to help people and mind is all about doing something each day for five minutes that helps you to nourish your mind you know um we're being bombarded in the 21st century with messages with emails with things to do with overload that's frankly overpowering and overwhelming our minds and that is a huge driver behind our stress levels and the mental health problems that exist so okay so i kind of feel all of us need five minutes on our mind each day then i thought okay well we know we need to move more right now movement can be many different things to many different people but i thought okay so five minute movements um also works super super well and that's really important everyone's trying to move more than they already do but again a lot of people may have to go to the gym right and it's just simply not true and i'd say to a lot of people joining a gym is probably the worst thing they can do honestly yeah it's a waste of money for a lot but for most people it is and actually if you talk to a lot of gym managers you know here's the sad truth about this is if everyone who joined the gym actually went to the gym you wouldn't be able to get in i've i've heard the same yeah it's it would be too full to get in it relies the whole model relies on people not going right so the body is all about five-minute movements and every day we should do a five-minute movement and i've given people options whether it's strength workout a high intensity interval workout a yoga flow a dancing workout skipping a playful workouts um you know something to work on your posture there are so many options there but the beauty of all of them is they all take five minutes max and for all of them you don't need any equipment right you don't need to join a gym you don't even need to get changed yeah right so that's the body section but then i thought because i got mind and body sorted first but i thought there's still something missing here right that is not complete health and i was thinking about what is that other component that is that is vital for health and this is the final part of the book and i actually think it's the most important part of the book and i say that in the book i actually say you may be skeptical about this section but it is the most important section it's what i've called hearts i know exactly what you mean because when i read it i it's it's woolly and nebulous in comparison to the first two parts and much harder to define isn't it but but i'm interested to hear what you're going to say because i kind of agree with you but i couldn't justify why so it would be great to hear your your view on it yeah well what is heart hearts look you're a medic student i was a medical student right so we learned about the heart at medical school but what we learned about it was that the heart is a physical organ right and it pumps blood around the body and that's its job now that's one meaning of hearts but what about the other meaning of hearts that poets and artists have been waxing lyrical about for years right that's got a slightly different meaning that's about connection right that's about connection with other people the world around us our friends our work colleagues our partners our children but also connection with ourself and the reason i think it's more important than any of the other sections is i've found over and over again when you get that heart piece right when you get that connection right mind and body sort of take care of themselves but you know when we don't have that connection we seek to find it or to compensate for it with a lot of our behaviors whether that's sugar whether it's alcohol um whether it's you know mindlessly scrolling instagram in the evening whatever it is often i've realized and it's taken me a long time to realize this and seeing a lot of patients but often that is the drive and we are living in a in a society devoid of connection you know we're ultra connected in so many ways but that's electronic connection and that's not the same as human meaningful connection and you know i put some stats in the book right the feeling of being lonely is very harmful for our health you know if you feel lonely you're 50 percent more likely to die earlier than somebody doesn't you're 30 percent more likely to have a heart attack or a stroke than someone who's nuts the feeling of being lonely is thought to be as harmful for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day yeah that's the study i've seen yeah yeah so so we can't ignore that we can't actually go oh yeah we've seen all that but actually how can i write a health book that i want to help every single person who reads it and their family and their community how can i write that and not cover this you know if for me it would be an incomplete health plan to do that and the reality is there's there's many great health books out there but one of the things i see over and over again is they a lot of them just focus on one area and i understand that and if i was writing books 10 years ago i might focus on one area but 20 years of clinical experience teaches me otherwise and that's you have to look at the whole picture um before you get that response so so it's mine it's body and it's heart and there's a lot of five minutes health ops i call them health snacks in the book you know they're not literally snaps or they're one of them is um they're they're five minute health stats and there's a lot of five minute uh hand snacks and you know these are these are little five minute things that you can do often in the evening whether it's gratitude whether it's sort of journaling practice um you know one of my favorites and the one i try and do on those evenings is something that i call the tea ritual and the tea ritual is something as i say i use them myself but i also use uh with many of my patients and it's really simple that the idea is that our relationships are under strain these days you look at the divorce rates they're going through the roof uh you look you know i'm sure in your friend's circle and just talking to patients would you would you agree you know everyone's struggling with their relationships absolutely yeah the connection i mean it's just it's harder i think to to connect because of society and i think just on a tangent you know what your book and what your work does very cleverly is it's like a wobble board on a wobble board on a wobble board you've got these societal factors you've got health and illness but what goes through the middle of them in in the work that you're doing is actually feeling better and living more but you've cleverly done it through these five-minute chunks it's you know and you're giving people so many options because one of the things i find is people come in and they go should i eat more turmeric do i need iron you know do i need to join the gym and it's they're overwhelmed whereas actually it doesn't matter is what you're saying in a way i'm saying it doesn't matter a little bit yeah um for most people it doesn't matter we and actually all that information and all that indecision about what we should do it's realizing it is it's a reason not to do anything we're paralyzed by choice we end up doing nothing and you know that's the whole behavior change piece which let's talk about that a little bit later um but but that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to connect because your brain is just full of information so you're distracted and you're not present yeah and i think that's part of the problem i think that's the main part of the problem i think even when we've got those golden moments with the people that mean the world to us you're filming it yeah not me but a lot of people do don't they yeah you're filming and again look just to be clear we're not having to go with anyone who's doing that right exactly we're just reflecting what's going on we're all of us pretty much at times we're with the people we love or the people we really care for physically we're there but emotionally we're not mentally we could be a million miles away because we're thinking about our instagram feed or which also sort of half reading emails at the same time you know what it's like so what is the tea ritual well the tea ritual is five minutes where you connect each day with somebody who's close to you now for me because i'm married and i find that because we've got two young kids and i'm busy and my wife's busy often days could go by and we were like passing ships you know you get up you sort of you're nodding your heads right it's co-workers i used to call it yeah exactly and i think a lot of people isn't it is but and i have found that by having five minutes every day of connection time it has transformed our relationship so the way it works in my house is when the kids are in bed and we've cleaned up the kitchen which again is something we're we've been trying hard to do so it does when it comes down to the place in the morning so we do that generally together and then before we do anything else before we go on our devices or you know whatever the things that we want to do in the evening individually are for five minutes we'll have a little tea ritual we've got a nice teapot put the kettle on um we have minty in the evening i was gonna ask you what's your favorite tea yeah it's it's fresh mint cheese for a number of reasons it doesn't have caffeine and b i love it it's tasty it's really really cheap you just find mint leaves and pop it in yeah it's cheaper than buying herbal tea it's really good isn't it and so we'll sit down and we won't have devices and for five minutes we sit there and just ask each other about each other's days um right now listen and i get it it sounds so simple fifteen twenty years ago i don't think you needed to have tea rituals right but what does that do just that five minutes of connection each day you feel closer you feel more connected you're more loving towards each other you start to feel that you care more for your partner in a way that you've always cared but it's easy to take people for granted when you're just busy all the time and i've used that with my patients if you haven't i'd recommend you do it because it is so many patients come back to me and say dr actually that's transformed my relationship and that's just one example there's loads and loads of examples and why i'm so passionate about this book aim is because i'm just sort of giving you a few examples there's over 50 i think examples of five minute health snacks in the book right but all you've got to do is choose three hmm one from mine one from body and one from hearts that's the other genius that is it that's all you have to do you don't need the choice will not paralyze you it's great i mean and that's that's the thing that surprised me because i was reading through the health snacks but then you keep reiterating you only need to pick three but the menu's enormous isn't it i mean the variety i mean even your most pernickety person would find something for them in there that's the great thing i mean i would be surprised if somebody can read this book and actually go and actually none of this applies to me yeah you know yeah because i've always said even in my first two books i've said to people when i go around the talk the country and i give talks and i talk to the public i say if there's a recommendation i've i've made that you don't like don't do it people are shocked when i say that and i'm like no don't do it there's there's loads of options in these books yeah choose the ones that do speak to you because if you try and maybe we can talk about behavior change because this really plays into that we know long term you're only going to stick to doing a behavior if you like doing it right it's very very rare that people manage to stick to things long term that they don't like so i'm saying choose one that you like choose one that speaks to you and actually makes your heart sing as you're reading it do that one yeah if there's one that you hear me talk about or you read about and you like all the health benefits you think it might work but you think i'm not really sure that's for me don't do it pick another one there's so many choices but when you've picked stick to the same ones every day and why is that that's to do with how you create a new habit right so i use an analogy in the book of tooth brushing right so most of us i think brush our teeth for two minutes in the morning two minutes in the evening so four minutes a day now we're not doing that anymore because our parents told us to do it um we're doing it as a habit it's a routine it's become ingrained it's just ingrained it's just what you do and i know that these five-minute health stats can also become ingrained in exactly the same way if you follow the rules of behavior change right but unfortunately we don't follow the rules of behavior change unfortunately look here's the reality you could buy at this time of year any health book off the shelf right anyone and if you follow it for two weeks you'll feel better you will it doesn't matter what the diet plan is if i'm honest right if you follow it or the movement plan or whatever if you manage to stick to it most of them are going to work you talk about making it stick don't you that's what exactly yeah exactly what i'm talking about there's all this every few paragraph every few chapters i've got this theme throughout the book called making it stick and that these one pages where i teach people how do you make this new health snack that you may like how do you make it stick in your life yeah and i give them you know make it very actionable but it all comes from behavior change science and one of the ways you do it i've already mentioned about making it easy yeah right but it's going back to these these these health books that will work anything can work for two weeks but what i'm interested in and what you're interested in his daughter is what's going to still be working in two months in two years absolutely right what's going to stop and break the cycle of this new year new you market every january right where suddenly everyone's buying health and well-being books and then by february they're sort of on the shelf somewhere i've been not doing them right i i very much hope mine don't fall into that category i try my best for them not to and judging from the comments i get and the emails and the messages i think people are using my books throughout the year which which feels amazing to me but i think i really do think this is the most practical of the lot and for someone who's really struggling this is probably one of the most effective health plans i think that they're going to be able to do um so when we talk about behavior change right you've got to make it easy right and let me just draw a contrast um or a comparison with amazon yeah right so you know amazon big business i don't know probably one of the world's biggest misses i'm guessing in terms of turnover now when amazon moved to one-click ordering a few years ago estimates say right that their profits went up by i think two to three hundred million dollars a year right so why is that well that's because in the past you had to check your order go to the next page confirm that you're happy with it next page type in your credit card details and then for the final time check again so maybe three or four steps before you placed your order it's too hard now before you've even blinked it says your order will arrive tomorrow yeah right now yes so the point is for all of us our behavior is constantly being changed whether we think it is or not by marketing by media by amazon by netflix right netflix roll one um you know episode into the next episode why because it's it's before you know it you started watching the second one every time you put an obstacle in the way it's a reason to say no if you had to get up from your sofa go there switch something on the dvd player or something you might think you know what maybe i'll go to bed now but before you know it you started watching again right and i'm not look amazon are doing what they need to do as a business netflix are doing what they need to do as a business but i'm saying we can use those same tools that businesses use to get you to buy more of their products we can use the same tools to help us with our health right and if you make something easy you will do it and that's why if we talk about this five minute workouts for example that's why every single workout in the book whether it's a yoga one whether it's a strength one whether it's an interval one requires no equipment right you don't need to get any equipment you don't need to get changed you don't need to go to a gym to make it as simple as possible like that patient i told you about right at the start that's why he did it because there wasn't a reason really to say no and so i'm trying to help people say look i understand behavioral science i've studied it i've gone to study with one of the world's leading experts bj fogg right and he's had a look at this and it's it all it was it was a beautiful meeting actually when i met bj because he he looked at it and he and i'm really delighted that he loved it but he said what's really interesting for me rongin is that you've got 20 years clinical experience and your clinical experience has come to the same conclusion as my 20 years of research and it was really nice i mean he's well he's the only name i know in behavior change actually and actually there's a quote about your book from him that i've got here which is high praise indeed so this is what pj fox says about feel better in five it says a superb guide to making lasting change in your life and one of the best habit change programs i've ever seen deceptively simple but remarkably effective how does that make you feel you know i have i've looked up to bj and has worked for years and i know that he is the world's leading expert in human behavior a lot of the uh books that people bond haven't changed whether it's near ryell or james claire these guys have all gone and studied with bj you know instagram i think was founded in his stanford class you know he set his students a um a challenge to he said i think he said that photo sharing is going to be big in the future um and so i want you guys to create an idea and an app that utilizes that and he's got the mark sheet that he gave to instagram and i think he gave a high commendation i think he said something like yeah he's got a very high chance of success this he was right he was right and so to have that sort of praise from him of course it's very humbling it's um you know of course on a personal level that makes me feel good you know it's nice to hear that yeah um but it also just it almost reinforces my belief that this is one of the most effective health programs out there right it really is and it's deceptively simple i think he's nailed it it is deceptively simple but you might think five minutes come on you know it's gotta be harder than that it's not if you get good at doing five minutes every day that's where the magic happens that's when things start to change right and and and it's you know if every single person in this country adopts at the field background fine program so basically spent five minutes each day on their minds five minutes on their body at five minutes on their hearts i guarantee we would have a healthier and a happier society sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation our biology is kind of set up to work with this 24-hour cycle of light and darkness and if you if you mess with that things start to happen to first of all to these circadian rhythms so these 24-hour fluctuations in our biology so if you're exposed to light at night one thing that does is it pushes your circadian rhythms later that's not necessarily a bad thing unless you have to wake up to go to work or school the next morning and if you're kind of seeing light late at night and your your circadian rhythms are being pushed later that means the time when you feel sleepy and want to go to sleep is pushed late later so you potentially get less sleep and if you get less sleep that's going to have an impact on your alertness on your mental functioning on your mood but it's more than that because bright light is also a kind of brain stimulant it it boosts your alertness so if you see light late at night you're going to feel more awake but also if you don't see light in the daytime you're going to feel more sluggish and and less alert and there are increasingly studies showing that bright light actually it literally wakes us up so you know we now spend 90 of our daytimes indoors where the light levels are like an order of magnitude lower than they are are outdoors today is kind of gray and rainy and gloomy luminance or brightness is measured in this unit called lux and on a day like today it's about 5000 lux outside on a bright sunny day in the middle of summer it could be as high as 100 thousand lux outside but indoors in the kind of standard office it might be two to three hundred lux so it's you know it's hugely dimmer inside than it is outside so even even on a cloudy day even on the cloudy we have evolved to actually have at least five ten thousand looks of light exposure to our you know through our eyes into our body yet you know for many of us living are these 90 indoor lifestyles now we might be getting only 2 300 likes so what is the implication of that what does that mean for us well okay so so light can influence the timing of those circadian rhythms um it can also influence the amplitude of how of of those rhythms so how kind of high the peaks are and low the troughs are so what you see in people who don't get outside much and particularly this has been studied in hospital patients and and people as they as they age so elderly patients in care homes their circadian rhythms kind of flatten so there's less difference between night time and daytime in their biology and that is linked to poorer health so things like depression increased risk of dementia that sort of thing it's incredible to think about this because you know i think about you know from what you just said i think about my mother and mom lives by herself now and she's you know she's become a little more immobile so she'll spend a lot of time inside most of the day and you know she also loves this ipad that i got her a few years ago and so not only is she not exposing herself to this bright natural lights in the day often in the evening she's exposing herself to bright artificial lights which again in many ways is sort of doing the las vegas thing on herself right it's almost flipping what we should be doing and the thing i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about over the last few years and it was really magnified when i was reading your book is when we talk about health you know the the popular media narrative around health always revolves around food and movements and i've been quite keen to sort of expand that out to include sleep and stress as well but i think there's a really strong case that actually light and our light exposure is another core pillar of health that maybe we have not been thinking enough about yes i think it is and and our light exposure also plays into those things especially the kind of movement side of things and stress actually because you know if you in my book i i kind of strongly advocate for very small changes to your life but basically it involves kind of brightening your daytime and darkening your evenings and night times but one way one brilliant way to brighten your daytime is just to get outside do a little bit of exercise get up from your desk you know if you start cycling to work or walking to work even getting off the bus or train a stop early and just doing that like last ten minutes walking you know you're getting exercise you're also out in nature hopefully um and that's a kind of stress buster and you know there's increasing evidence that spending all day just sitting down just not getting up and down again is is really harmful to our health and again if you're just making little efforts to just get up just go for a walk around the block at lunchtime or you know on your on your breaks um i think that can make a difference it will certainly make a difference to your alertness during the daytime but you're also strengthening those circadian rhythms which are so important for our health absolutely i mean you say you would you would imagine but i use this as one of the tips i give my patients in practice and it's something i wrote about in my first book and there's a chat called embrace morning lights and it was in the sleep section and the whole point was to say when we talk about sleep we're often thinking about what we do in that hour hour and a half before bed and of course that can be incredibly important but we forget about what we do in the morning and i remember when i've heard this from patients but i also got quite a few messages on twitter from people after um they read embrace morning white in the four pillar plan they said i've not been sleeping for years very well and i now go for a 20-minute walk outside in the morning and my sleeps got better so although there are other things that could be playing a role it really is that powerful getting outside in the morning is is really really powerful isn't it for setting that circadian rhythm and i think you had some let me see if i've got it here in your book um i've i've actually scribbled all over your book i hope you don't mind so it's it's because there's so many great great things to talk about that's fine i do lots of books scribbling um and you talked about this german studies that suggested that exposure to bright light in the morning boosted people's reaction speeds and maintained them at a higher level throughout the day even after that product that was switched off yeah and you also mentioned another study when exposure to bright morning lights um basically those who were exposed to it between 8 a.m and noon it took them an average of 18 minutes to fall asleep at night compared to 45 minutes in the low-light exposure group so this is not just hey a bit of light in the day this is actually changing our biology there's actually another study that i cite in the book it's a lab-based study and it showed that if you expose people to bright light during the daytime they sleep better the following night they get more deep sleep and they get less fragmented sleep and if they do wake up in the night they feel less tired the next morning even though they've been waking up at night so i think it improves the quality of your sleep but then there's the moods there's the mood side of things as well we know that larks so people who tend to be early birds wake up early want to go to sleep earlier at night tend to be less prone to depression and mental illness and actually lots of there's lots of other advantages health advantages to being a lark um but possibly some of this is because they're you know if you're exposed to bright morning light it push it pulls your circadian rhythms earlier so even if you're a night owl if you see lots of bright early morning lights your your circadian rhythms are shifted earlier and i think why that's important for mood is that mood has a 24 hour rhythm like um like sleep and like all these other things and your like lowest point of mood tends to be around 4 a.m 4 30 5 a.m um you know before you wake up usually and then you kind of like going up this slope and getting happier and happier during the daytime if you shift your circadian rhythms earlier and then you wake up at say like 6am 7am you're already quite a long way up that slope towards a happier mood but if you're kind of shifted later if you're kind of like a night owl or you're making yourself a night owl by your light exposure when you wake up you're going to be closer towards that trough of of low mood it's interesting isn't it and i think let's explore chronotypes because i think that's super fascinating for people this idea of morning larks and night owls um as you as you were describing that i sort of wondered to myself is it that you know night owls are more prone to low mood because of their biology or is it because modern society is set up in a way that you know that basically is preferential to be a lark right i am a lot i'm a i'm an early bird i like getting up early i'm i'm a total morning person so you know i can get up and sort of you know get a hold of the day and by lunchtime i've done loads and loads of work and i feel great um whereas i've got friends and and and family who who don't really operate like that and you know do you feel that if you don't have that chronotype you are at a disadvantage in the way the world is set up yes i absolutely do and teenagers are a really classic example of that because teenagers naturally shift their circadian rhythms later they can't help it this is just something that happens at adolescence so asking a teenager to get up at 7am to get ready for school is liking asking you or i to get up at 5am and there's no one no reason it's no surprise they feel kind of groggy and cross when they get up in the morning it's funny you say that actually because it's it's what we're recording this at the start of that semester schools have just gone back and my nephew actually has just moved to secondary school and after i dropped the kids off at school this morning i saw him at his new bus stop because he's got to get like a 30 minute bus to his secondary school and he was half asleep and he was yawning now he's only 11 or 12 years old so he's not quite a teenager but i thought if this was to continue for a few years i mean is that the best way to start off a teenager in their school day you know i mean are schools adapting to this research are they evolving to this very very slowly um so in the uk we're we're relatively lucky actually on international terms or our teenagers are relatively lucky because in in the us on the continent schools typically start a lot earlier you know some schools in the us at least they used to start at sort of 8 a.m 7 30 a.m some of them and there have been a number of studies now in the us looking at what happens if you shift the school starting time a bit later more like 8 30 or 9 a.m which is what happens in the uk and it has a really big impact on their on their um absenteeism and on their on their grades as well actually there's been less research on this in the uk because schools here start more like 8 30 or 9 a.m but certainly there are some schools that are starting to take this seriously there's a school there's a private school in london which is allowing its sixth formers to start at i think 1pm or 2pm and do you know all their learning in the afternoons and early evenings um but there was a study of a secondary school in the uk which changed its start time to 10 a.m and again you saw this you saw this drop in absenteeism so kids were less likely to be kind of coming in or not going to school because they were sick um but also their gcse grades increased following this change they've now changed back i'm not sure why they changed back but they they changed back and then they saw a dip again it's fascinating that because on one level society would probably deem late start as a bit lazy a bit um yes and actually but there has been a study that has shown that if you have an early bird manager and you're in you're a night owl they will judge your performance as worse than if you have a fellow employee who is an early bird because what that manager is seeing that manager kind of comes to work like you all cheerful and like i'm raring to go at like 9 00 a.m and then they're kind of night owl employees come in and they kind of sit there and they need several coffee coffees to wake up maybe they don't get going um until the early afternoon or even the evening and that like not that early birds manager has gone home and they don't see that that night owl like really really doing their best work in the in the evenings and there's another thing actually which is this thing called social jet lag so i think another reason why night owls might have worse health outcomes is because of this thing called social jet lag and actually to to quote the circadian biologist till ronenberg who came up with this phrase social jet lag the more of it you have the fatter dumber grumpier and sicker you'll be because what social jet lag is is where your um sleep and wake times differ between weekdays and weekends because if you're a night owl um you know and you're having to get up early all throughout the week you're probably cutting short your sleep on those weekdays because you're not kind of naturally disposed to feel sleepy until quite late in the evenings so you're getting short sleep on weekdays and then on weekends you're sleeping in to make up for that so there's this difference between your kind of sleep and wake times on weekdays and those sleep and wake times on weekends and you're effectively moving time zones when you do that yeah for sure i mean look there's so many themes i want to pick up on um i guess on social jet lag we see this in medicine a lot that certain things get triggered by lions at the weekend so it's very well known that migraines are often triggered by lying in at the weekends and once you start to understand circadian biology you start to now put together some mechanisms as to why that might happen so people are always told to get up at the weekend at the same time as on the wheat day as a strategy maybe to prevent a migraine at the weekends which is super fascinating i didn't know that but that but certainly psychiatric episodes have been shown to be associated with jet lag so but it's doesn't that all support just how strong um and robust circadian biology is and how messing around with it can have unforeseen implications yes i think it does we were just talking about how um how social jetlag is literally like real jet lag that you're kind of shifting time zones you know twice a week between the week days and weekends your body clocks will adapt but actually what's increasingly becoming evident is that we now know we have these clocks in all our tissues it's not just a kind of single clock in the brain you've got them everywhere in your you know your heart cells your liver cells your fat cells even have these clocks and they don't all adjust exactly the same rate so if you if you change time zones either by traveling abroad or by shifting your sleep wake times you're dragging all of those clocks along to a new time zone but they don't all drag they don't all move at the same time so what you get is this this kind of circadian desynchrony spreading throughout the body where these clocks start to be out of time with each other and eventually they will all get back in time with each other but in the meantime you know you have this kind of the way i see the body and the circadian clocks working in the body is a bit like a factory assembly line you know to do something simple like digest a meal it requires coordination between quite a lot of different organs and tissues you know you've got your gut cells you've got your liver you've got your um you've got your fat cells you've got your pancreas that produces insulin so you need this kind of coordinated torque between these different organs and just like in a factory production line if things start getting out of time with each other you get a less efficient manufacturing process and a like less good product it's the same with our health i think i think people who've traveled over multiple times those will recognize that that's even if you start to adjust to the new sleep time you know your gut yeah your digestion things aren't quite right so some of it's left behind on your old clock still or it takes a bit longer and you know you can have this sensation that i've certainly felt sometimes when you you eat in your new time zone out of sync with what your body's clock is is telling you is the right thing and the next morning you can actually feel hung over and you're not drunk any alcohol but you feel hungover because everything's just slightly out of sync yeah and i definitely get that that's one of the worst things i find about jet lag is that kind of digestive problems but actually food food is another thing so light affects the timing of our clock and and causes our clocks to change time but actually the timing of when we eat also affects the timing of some of those clocks in some of those tissues so ideally we want to be kind of sinking our kind of our light exposure and our our eating patterns with you know we want we want to be basically getting up eating and then you know when when it gets dark stopping stopping eating i mean that's the way we evolved and i think if you're kind of eating later there's evidence that if you eat later you're more prone to put on weight even though you're eating exactly the same meal um i think really what we want is regularity both in our light exposure but also in our meal times and our exercise so there's some evidence now that exercise also affects the timing of those clocks yeah absolutely absolutely it's very clear light does food is known to to impact the circadian clock and you know i think we're going to find more and more things are and i think this really for me it really highlights why i think humans certainly talk about myself and my experience with patients when you have a routine that's roughly you know pretty similar from day to day you just feel better you know when your sleep times are regular when your meal times are regular even monday to friday and you maintain that at the weekends i mean some people may listen and go well what sort of life is that that's a you know people might think that's a boring dull life i don't know whether it's my age or not i love regularity and routine i love being out to go to bed at the same time wake up at the same time eat roughly at the same time and um you know sachin panda who you've i think quoted a couple of times in your book he's and he's been on the podcast he he's done incredible research to show that the timing of our meals certainly has huge importance arguably could be as important as what you eat i mean i think that the jury is still out on that but yeah but it's pretty powerful that just changing the timing of your meals can impact your weight your immune system and your circadian clock yeah yeah and i think i think i you know so i so while i was writing this book i made quite a few changes to my lifestyle starting with light really um and we can talk about my experiment i would love to talk about that it sounds like the sort of wacky experiment that i would do with my kids like right kids daddy's got a new plan today like what is it this time so you know but we'll go into that just i'll tell you about that in a minute but but so the first kind of changes i made was to do with my light exposure but then i got more and more interested in this kind of this idea of social jet lag and also the the the meal timing and i mean just in the last year i've been i've been recording a podcast for the bbc which involves having to get up one day a week really really early to go to london and i i just started going this is this is i know from all my research that this is bad for me but i really really feel it because one day a week i'm having to get up at 6 a.m rather than 7 30 when i normally do and the next day i just i feel like i have jet lag and i you know so so now i'm trying to i've realized that if i'm going to keep going to london or having you know some days where i have to get up early it makes sense to always try and get up a bit early yeah and then and i but you know once you once you do that and once you establish that regularity you do feel better so one you know you've you've tantalizingly uh told the listeners and the viewers about this experiment that you did so first of all tell me what was the experiment and also i'm really intrigued to know when you came home one day with this idea and you thought you'd tell your husband is it and your kids about your new idea what was the response okay well and this is relevant to this whole thing of you know well i don't want to go to bed early and it's really boring if i go to bed early because you know a lot of us like well i feel alert at night and i want to go out at night and see my friends and stuff but after this experiment i've kind of changed my view of this so my idea was what would happen if we go cold turkey on artificial light after dark that was my original thing i was just interested in what happens if we get rid of all this artificial light and so i went and saw these sleep researchers at the university of surrey and said i'd like to do this experiment will you help me and they said yes um but what we'd like you to always also think about is to try and boost your daylight exposure which is how i first came across this this all this research or emerging research about the importance of daylight so we devised this experiment where and we did it in the middle of winter um where i would turn off the lights in the house after i wanted to do it when the sun went down but that that was kind of impractical because i wanted to carry on my work as normal and i i work on a computer so so i couldn't really and you're a journalist and i'm a journalist and i i'm a freelance journalist so if i don't work then i don't get paid so um so it was impractical to do that but that's kind of okay anyway because you know if we if we evolved and closer to the equator with a more kind of like 12-hour light dark exposure thing i kind of we reasoned that that wasn't such a terrible thing to do to turn the lights out at six um so the idea was that from 6 p.m onwards there would be no electric light and we would use candles instead and then in the daytime i would try even though it was the middle of winter i would try and even though i'm bound to a desk in my work um i would do everything i could to get as much bright light exposure as possible so that was things like you know after the school drop-off in the morning just you know sitting in the park with my notepad doing my to-do list outside rather than at the kitchen table where it's really dark um and you know going for a walk around the block like i said earlier at you know at regular intervals trying to eat outdoors um also you know just taking you know when i made my breakfast in the morning just going outside with my cup of tea and just you know standing in the garden and eating my cup of tea and my my bit of toast um and also swapping kind of indoor exercise i did quite a lot of exercise um but swapping going to the gym in like a windowless exercise studio for doing the same kind of exercise outdoors but i had to convince my family to also at least turn out the lights at night and at the time like i think my kids were kind of six and four i'm like not too bad still you can some you have some influence over them still at that age i guess well yeah i mean yeah i mean i could say this is what we're doing uh and you're gonna have to live with it but my daughter's response was to burst into tears and say oh mummy it's going to be spooky i don't like the dark and i kind of said oh no it'll be lovely you know we go camping quite a lot it'll be just like going camping you know like having fires and candles and she wasn't completely convinced my son who's really into halloween at first was like this will be great and he also said if it's like camping can we have lots of marshmallows so i did a lot of bribing with marshmallows but actually by the end of living like this you know we we did this on off for six weeks in the middle of december um well it was beginning of december until mid january and by the end of it was my it was my six-year-old daughter who was the one who was saying i really like it it's really cozy and and nice in the evening to have the lights dimmed and it was my son who was complaining that he couldn't see his toys and he wanted to watch telly um but you know it actually it actually was a very positive experience for us what was the impact of doing this so um you know for you and your husband sure but also i'm interested with your kids did you notice anything different were they was their mood different energy were they sleeping better i mean what what went on with the family i was the only one who actually feel i i did a load of tests on myself so you objectively tracked your data i tracked my data i didn't tracked i didn't track my family's data because it was just too complicated uh and you know my kids go to school and it's difficult to control all that stuff but i tracked myself very very extensively so the impact on me was that first of all i felt sleepier earlier in the evening it was december it was the run-up to christmas which is a really sociable time so we did have quite a lot of guests coming to our house i think in part out of curiosity to find out what on earth i was doing and what it was like to live with with candles um but you know there would i was definitely sleepier earlier in the evenings i wanted to go to bed like at sort of 9 10 o'clock rather than 11 or 12 o'clock um i didn't always do that because of social obligations but i wanted to we also um we once a week we took readings of my melatonin now melatonin is a hormone that you release it's under the control of the kdn clock and you release it in the evening at night and it's basically a kind of biological signal to your whole body that it's time to shift change into night mode and one thing it does is it impacts on the sleep centers so it does tend to you know you release melatonin and your brain kind of goes ah night time it's time to feel sleepy here's some sleep signals and what we found was that i started secreting melatonin between one and a half and two hours earlier than when i lived normally so that explains why i was feeling sleepier earlier because my body was was saying it's night time this is two hours earlier i mean for people listening i just want to emphasize how you know how striking a point you just made we're talking about a very important hormone in our body yes that's associated with sleep there are other studies associate suggesting it's an antioxidants that it may have some anti-cancer properties potentially and you know we can maybe explore that later in our conversation but this is an important hormone that is under this circadian clock that simply by switching off artificial light in the evening you are shifting maybe two hours beforehand you're changing an important hormones secretion by two hours yes that is significant if a drug was doing that we'd be talking about it there would be a list of side effects on it yeah we're sort of many of us are doing that every evening yeah on our devices without the awareness of the implications but the other thing is that i also so i did some weeks where i was turning off the lights in the evening we did a week where i both turned the lights off and got outdoors more and we did a week where i didn't worry about my light exposure in the evening i just got outdoors more in the daytime and on that week as well we saw this shift towards earlier melatonin secretion so are you saying that even if you didn't you can mitigate the impact of your sort of artificial light exposure in the evenings by getting more daylight in the day yeah well you can shift your clock earlier by getting more daylight in the day but that german study you mentioned earlier about if you expose people to bright light in the in the morning um that improves their alertness throughout the day that also showed that it mitigated the effect of bright light at night on circadian rhythms so usually if you see bright light at night it will shift your clocks later if you see bright light in the daytime it seems to stop even if you're exposed to bright light at night it seems to stop that shift it's almost like your body locks onto the brightest sort of source of light light it sees in that 24-hour cycle and uses that to kind of set its timing and that is for me that's like a i mean i've seen some of this research and i think that that is something that people should really be taking hold of going okay look trying to get people to reduce their screen exposure in the evening can often be very challenging oh god i know that myself it's extremely challenging on a regular basis to do that now at least by getting more natural light exposure in the day you are actually potentially insulating yourself from some of the implications of being on your screens in the evening so people can almost how can i put it have their cake and eat it right if they get outside more yeah yeah yes i think so but i think you still ideally want to you don't have to switch off your screens but you can dim your screens you can tune out some of the blue lights or blue wavelength light which our circadian system seems to be particularly um responsive to and you can do simple things like you know you don't have to get rid of screens and go back to the dark ages and just have candles in your house you can you know just switch off your overhead lights and just switch to like dim table lamps around your home as well that's going to dim your light exposure and then if you're combining that with more daylight then that's going to that's going to be better yeah what did you do i'm intrigued because you know we actually try and do some of these things in our house the more i read about light the more i get quite particular on it in the evening so i don't want these lights from the ceiling on i just want either candles or dim lights on but our bathroom has got these big bright led lights in yes and so obviously it's sort of summery time at the moment so i tell the kids you don't need the light on in the bathroom when you're when you're going but what did you do at night in the bathrooms yeah well i'm really annoyed about our bathroom lights actually because when we when we moved into our our house five years ago we got these dimmable bathroom lights um and they were great because we've got the led bulbs in the ceiling and you could pull the cords and it would dim them right down so that's great but then there was some problem with them and our electricians basically said sorry we can't we can't sort out the dimmer and now the only thing we have in our bathroom is bright lights and that's a problem so i now have this little night light that i use when i go to the bathroom at night i just put on this little you know you just shake it and it comes on and it's just a dim light in the bathroom so you can see but it's not this really bright glaring thing um when i was doing my experiment i think i used candles which is a bit of a health hazard yeah yeah we say that and i guess it is um you know before the advent of artificial light i'm sure that's what people did right well yes well i was about to say i went and stayed with an amish family in pennsylvania while i was doing the research for chasing the sun and they have oil lamps in there in their bathrooms so you know the kind of paraffin old-fashioned paraffin lamps that's that's what they tend to there you go well we're gonna we're gonna go to that let's just close off your experiments so you were noticing big changes yeah oh yes so so i also tracked i did these kind of mood and alertness questionnaires just before i went to bed each night and when i woke up in the morning and the main thing i saw from that is that on the weeks when i was doing these interventions like cutting out light and getting more daylight um i was waking up raring to go i was waking up alert and my morning mood was much better but then the impact on the rest of my family so we didn't track them in as much detail but um definitely my husband commented on how nice it was in the evenings and how he just felt more relaxed my daughter at the end of this whole ordeal um was you know saying i really like it it's really relaxed people who came to our house to visit in fact we had a new year's eve party in the dark and um apart from you know nearly giving our guests food poisoning because we couldn't see if we'd cook the beef burgers and nearly chopping my finger off um apart from those things which um you know living with candles are problems um they also commented we had some friends who'd been at another party first and then they came to our house and they said wow it's really chilled out here in a really good way you know people people behave differently when when the lights are low i think um and the other thing on that new year's eve party that everyone commented on was we you know we had quite a lot of people over and so we put and we've all got young children so a lot of people put their kids to bed up upstairs in our in our house and you know usually you've got kids if you try and put like a load of sort of three to eight-year-olds to bed on mass in a in a room they're not they're not asleep three hours you know they'll still be up at midnight um but they were i kid you not they were all asleep by nine o'clock you know what it's it's so interesting to hear that because i really do feel that light influences you know it exerts such an influence on the way we are our moods our sleep levels our alertness so much is influenced by lights and i just don't think we we've taken it seriously you know if i remember coming across some of this research a few years ago when my kids were young my kids would always get up super early and they always wanted a nightlight on in the hall or in their room which was the white night lights and a few years ago when i was researching this and i came across that red light has a very has it has less of an impact on our circadian rhythms than white lights or blue lights and so i thought okay fine so i bought a a red bulb and put that as our night lights and i'm not kidding you instantaneously and again this is not a scientific experiment this is just my experience of this my kids were sleeping an hour later every morning consistently and i thought so in my head i was thinking this is not a coincidence their light their light their night light has changed from white to reds and it's it felt as though it was no longer altering their circadian rhythms they were they were sleeping for longer and you know it's just something it's it's interesting to reflect on that and then hear the story about when you don't have artificial light in the evening you put all these kids together on mass and they all fall asleep it just makes me it really makes me reflect on have we missed over the last 20 30 years in all our discussions on health have we missed a big part a big piece in the jigsaw could our exposure to light potentially be more important than the food that we eat i don't think we know the answer to that yet but i think certainly it's been under-appreciated and also it's really worth just reflecting on the fact that you know we we take light at night for granted it's only 140 years since thomas edison invented the incandescent light bulb before that i mean we had gas lights for you know a few decades before that but you know it was in the early 1800s that and that's only you know that's only just over 200 years ago that light in the evening was a thing before then all we had were like tallow candles or whale oil lamps which most people couldn't afford or fire light and so most people went to bed not long after the sun went down they stayed up a little while around fires and so on but they didn't have artificial light and our biology is set up for there to be darkness at night it's it's like it's amazing to hear how malleable our our body clocks are because you made the change and experiment with your own family and you you're suddenly feeling sleepier than you normally are uh when my wife started wearing these blue light blocking glasses that i got her in the evening so even she went on her laptop and she put her her blue light blocking glasses on i think for a week at 7 00 p.m by half seven she was yawning her head off and thinking and normally she could stay until 10 half 10. yeah and so suddenly by blocking light exposure you're almost allowing your body to return to its to its natural rhythm it's important to declare an end to the day even when you haven't completed everything i think that is such powerful advice and i wonder if you could sort of explain what exactly you mean by that and how that can help people yes you know it's um it's really amazing that um declaring an end to the day is one of my favorite micro steps right now because the truth is that the vast majority of people do not have an end to their day you know we could all stay um answering emails handling things through the night so we need to declare it and i believe in rituals so i believe in um a little ritual and my ritual is turning off my phone and charging it outside my room in fact thrive has launched only one product and we are selling it at cost because we're selling it to help people change habits rather than as a profit making exercise it's a little bed it's a phone charging a little bed with a blankie and you can travel under the blanket tuck them in say good night i'm going to send you one wrong and as a gift because it's great for your kids your kids are nine and seven right yeah ten ten and seven now yeah and they probably don't have phones yet they don't and this is something that well a you know they know what daddy stands for what he writes about in his books but for me there's a conflict between knowing what these what this technology can do but not wanting my son or my daughter to be a social outcast in terms of what the rest of their friends saying it it's something i'm wrestling with myself if i'm honest well i think uh rongan just being able to set boundaries like when you have your phone back teaching for example your son that's where your phone sleeps from the beginning it's not a punishment it's like the way we teach our kids to brush their teeth we teach them phone hygiene because one of the biggest problems is that teenagers sleep with their phones i mean we all sleep with our phones i mean unless we consciously choose not to sleep with their phones that's the default position so um they sleep with their phones and then in the middle of the night they snap and they tick talk and and then they wake up exhausted and that's the vicious cycle so i think for me and that's why we actually called it the family phone bed because we wanted it to be used by families it has room for 10 phones um to to you know teach each other and support each other yeah and in building this good habit i think that's one of the best things i've i've ever heard a phone bed i i it's such a lovely concept isn't it and i like that that idea this is not a punishment you know your phone your beloved phone needs deans to rest here's a nice bed for it i can't wait to see it it's uh it's it sounds really really cool actually you've obviously written an amazing book on sleep and you know what are the habits that you do around your own sleep to make sure that you are getting as much as you need well the science is very clear that um unless you have a genetic mutation and that's interesting some people who are listening may have a genetic mutation one to one and a half percent of the population does and they don't need a lot of sleep um you can take a genetic test or if you are conscious you probably know if you have it or not i know i don't have it if i get four hours i'm like a zombie i need eight hours people need somewhere between seven and nine to be fully recharged to go through all the cycles think of it like a dishwasher um in my book on sleep you can see that it's like you need to complete all the cycles and the dishwasher is a good metaphor because you're going to say you know i'm going to take it take the laundry out 15 minutes earlier because i'm in a hurry well you're going to end up with wet and dirty laundry because you have not completed the cycles and sleep is as important for the body as it is for the brain it's the only time when we can clear the toxins from the brain and that's why now there are all these findings about the connection between sleep deprivation and alzheimer's yeah yeah it's so fascinating it's so fascinating i absolutely agree that charging your phone outside the bedroom is it's such a it's like a keystone habit if you get that right then knock on effects is quite significant and i always say to people look don't beat yourself up you know these things are designed to be addictive it's not it's not failing on your part you know if you have it next to your bed and you wake up at three o'clock to use the bathroom and you then look at it on your way back that's not because you're weak it's it's you know it's designed for you to touch it and play with it and do things so i i agree with you you know keeping it outside of the bedroom if i bring it into the bedroom which i do sometimes still i mostly don't but i'm human i'm tempted you know i struggle you know i can't get off the thing in fact my wife and i have a a deal with each other which is like we we've got full permission to you know tell the other one leave that phone in the kitchen leave it it charges in the kitchen overnight is basically how we try and do it great and that's fantastic to have like an accountability body so you are each other's accountability body um and then no judgments i mean one of the things we we tell are the people we work with this you know yes we are not going to do it to do it perfectly no judgments let's just do it the next night yeah know for sure arena i wanted to talk about your own mother because i've heard you talk about her on multiple occasions and what an amazing influence she was on you um what would you say some of the key lessons that she taught you were so one of the key lessons was around failure you know she used to say that failure is not the opposite of success it's a stepping stone to success and so she really taught my sister and me to be very willing to take risks and to be willing to fail along the way and that made a big difference in you know starting businesses or even launching books because when you publish a book you never know how it's going to be received and a lot of people shy away from that so i think that was a big big lesson from her another one was um [Music] her unconditional loving which i think the greatest gift we can give to our children and because it also empowered me to reach for whatever i wanted to achieve knowing that if i didn't she wouldn't love me any less yeah wonderful and are those two lessons that you think you have managed to also pass on to your own children um i often ask them because i always have been judging myself against having an amazing mother and and they tell me i do and i you know my my kids went through a lot of problems you know my youngest daughter dealt with anorexia my oldest daughter dealt with drugs she's been sober for eight years now so it's not like it was a story of linear success but we we kind of through everything we went together i feel that um they've become so much more resilient and loving towards others and actually my my youngest daughter who is a painter she um did art at yale and she's made her living by painting um now has her first book coming out i'll send it to you and it was kind of interesting she she was hit by a bike in new york two and a half years ago and hit her head hard on the pavement and suffered from debilitating headaches and a lot of other medical problems as a result and during that time she she had her own like a spiritual awakening and so she wrote this book which is an audible original coming out in november which was going to be called my cosmic quarrel with the universe and other minor matters but now it's called the map to the unknown but it was kind of interesting for her generation in her twenties grappling with these big existential questions of god and the universe and meaning plus chronic pain and and um it was wonderful and being very funny i think sometimes using humor even during difficult moments in our lives is one of the best ways to get our messages across yeah okay for sure thank you for sharing that and yeah i look forward to reading your daughter's book it sounds sounds incredible um you mentioned she had a spiritual awakening and i've often got the thought in my head as i've i spent a lot of time reading about you over the last few days actually as i said it's really been very enjoyable there's so much out there but often i've heard things like you mentioned stoic philosophy or you mentioned the indian text the bhagavad gita and i've often thought you know are you spiritual how do you feel that these ancient texts and these ancient philosophies how and can they help us in the modern 21st century oh a thousand percent in fact um the last piece i wrote in my newsletter i'll send it to you is about this uh all all of our spiritual quests and i wrote a book in the 90s about it which don't worry about four people read so don't worry if you didn't read it uh which was called the fourth instinct and uh for me the if you think of the first three instincts um being survival sex and power you know different biologists and psychologists give them different names but these are the three acknowledged instincts i think you can't understand human behavior without looking at what i call the fourth instinct which is our instinct towards um meaning and something larger than ourselves which if you want is the spiritual instinct and a lot of people have rejected it because they've rejected organized religion but the instinct is an instinct and organized religion is just one of thousands of manifestations and ancient wisdom whether it's in the bhagavad-gita or the tao in china or zen in japan or the stoics and it's just really many different ways to describe one universal truth which is that we all have venus that place of wisdom peace and strength and most of the time we are completely disconnected from it and all these pauses that we are encouraging people to bring into their lives are about giving us opportunities to reconnect to that place which is our birthright we all have it if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that i really think you're going to enjoy give it a click and let me know what you think i'm on a mission to get every human being to add one thing to their morning routine this takes five days to work before you have an enormous breakthrough in how you see and relate to yourself

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 219,903

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: Gisc8EHiJfg

Length: 178min 41sec (10721 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022