This Is The Most Powerful Tool To Improve Your Health with Dr Julian Abel | Feel Better Live More

we've been led to believe that the medications are going to save us but in fact compassion and the social relationships are often more powerful than the medication and that if you deal with that first of all that's when you're going to make the biggest impact on people's health and well-being [Music] the medical outcomes of compassion are so powerful that it it if you want to use the best treatment you have to use the most effective therapeutic tools and compassion is the one the one that is the most therapeutic and so part of the conversation about you know doing the podcast and getting this out there and everything is about saying look this is we need to change medicine because it's more powerful than most of the medicines we take yeah you know i mean julian for me compassion it feels almost like it's the right thing to do it feels good to us as a human being when we're compassionate to another individual so what's interesting for me is that you're showcasing in your book a load of science that is backing up kind of what we already know right i i think that's exactly right and those moments where we feel that the love and compassion we all recognize them and they might be they might be deeply profound moments like the moment we first see our child or we kiss the person we love or or we hold our child's hand any of those moments they they're more than just a an emotion they you you can feel physically different but they happen on a small scale as well like when you go to the shops and you you chat to somebody or or for example on the way here i chatted to peta the taxi driver um who knows you and he's such a nice guy and and when you have that conversation you feel like well this is good this is a i i enjoyed that and i appreciate it and all of those things although they are an emotion they also have got a physical biochemical and hormonal components to them but i guess the essence is that we all know that it's the right thing and i guess this gets to the heart of the subject matter that the point about writing the book was really to say look we need to elevate compassion as a high value something that we need to pay attention to all the time and something that is as applicable in our personal lives our lives at home as it is in our schools our places of work our politics our media and and it's not just that it's a nice thing to have it has a profound impact on everything that you do and including running profitable businesses or even thinking into the future thinking about the environment and and being compassionate even for our children and our children's children because if we can bring in that compassion we can then make sensible decisions which are not based on short-term personal gain how would you define compassion so a much debated topic and and people get really penicky about the details of it so so you can you can define it as saying well we all know what it is to suffer and and uh and we know that we don't like suffering and so we want to be happy and and we recognize that other people suffer in the same way and when we when we see that suffering it's not just that we that we want to do something about it we're actually motivated to do something about it um and and so you can define compassion as the um that sense of a common emotion that motivates us into action and but i would say that that human emotions don't fit very neatly into categories and and because it's not just compassion is like a thing on its own you know because it comes with kindness it comes with loving kindness as well yeah and and when we have love we have compassion and if our love is without compassion that's problematic um if our compassion is without love that's problematic yeah i mean it's half the problem that i even asked the question how do we define it is that actually one of the problems and that we we're trying to put our rational brain lens our scientific lens through okay define it what does that actually mean right and then and then if we can't so we can't put it in neat's little box we don't give it its validity we sort of underplay it i i completely agree and and i would say that um that we we might want to define compassion using our kind of logical frameworks but we can also connect it to our direct experience we can recognize it within ourselves and and i think that in the context of of how you practice as a doctor you know that what we're we've been led to believe that the medications are going to save us but in fact what we're saying and the whole basis of our argument is that the compassion and the social relationships are often more powerful than the medication and that if you deal with that first of all that's when you're going to make the biggest impact on people's health and well-being there's a narrative isn't there a society that good guys can last right and there's it's kind of this capitalist sort of you've got a you got to push the other person down you got to keep pushing you know you can only make it to the top whatever the top means by you know elevating yourself at the expense of others and your work clearly shows that that is not the case at all but for skeptics right at the start of this conversation who are thinking well you know you you're a lot more experienced than me but two experienced doctors i've got about 20 years clinical practice what are you on now well i i'm now retired from clinical practice so that's 40 years of slaving away at it wow okay so you know over double what i have had okay so with all our clinical experience between us we're saying that compassion is one of the most important things we can do now for people who are skeptical of that how would you convince them so i think there are four good reasons as to why compassion is a good idea the first is that when you look at the evidence of the what happens from the positive side of compassion the evidence is really profound and and compassion is the basis of social relationships and there are numerous studies out there which which show that social relationships have a profound impact on health and in particular there's uh one that i always quote by julianne holt lundstep and it's the impact of social relationships on mortality and good social relationships are more powerful than pretty much any other intervention we have including giving up smoking drinking diet exercise what whatever else you care to mention helping us live longer and that's more than just a nice thing that's because it's it's embedded in our biochemistry and our biology the second the second reason is when you look at the impact of loneliness and loneliness has a increases your chances of dying early by about 30 percent and um and i know you you uh had a podcast with vivek murthy and he wrote a book about all of that with loads of evidence in it the third reason is that when you look at the presence of hormones like oxytocin and oxytocin receptors you find them throughout the animal kingdom and human beings are the most social of animals now the presence of octo oxytocin oxytocin receptors which is the hormone that is associated with compassion the so-called socializing hormone its mere presence means that it has an evolutionary advantage it couldn't possibly be there without it helping us and and what that means is that actually we survived through being compassionate and being kind that survival of the fittest interestingly was a term that was invented by herbert spencer not charles darwin and he started uh social darwinism with uh which has got loads of implications which are not so great but in fact darwin wrote a book on uh the impact of emotions in man and animals so that you we can look from it from an evolutionary perspective and call it survival of the kindest rather than survival of the fittest we didn't get through the ice age by by beating our chests and killing each other actually there's plenty of evidence which showed that we helped each other out people with with significant disabilities that they got in childhood living to old age and then finally uh i think a piece of evidence that helps because it's measurable we can look at the outcomes of what happened in the compassionate community program that happened in froome where we saw emergency admissions drop by 30 percent at a time where they were increasing everywhere else and there are no interventions ever which have reduced population emergency admissions i've got one other thing to add that i forgot and that's the harvard and gluex studies of adult development which in which studies began in 1938 in harvard looking at um what happened to people through measuring year on year and reinterviewing and looking at the outcomes and and the fourth leader of the study because it's gone on for so many years says it's it's if you want to lead a happy healthy long life it's all about relationships and the basis of relationships is compassion and and so if you're thinking about why is compassion more than a good idea uh it's because it has a profound impact on everything we do in everything we touch and even from a personal perspective if you want to be healthy and happy be compassionate yeah you can actually have well can you have a selfish reason for being compassionate like if we if we if we look at this individual individualistic culture that that many of us are falling prey to these days this idea that oh if i'm kind to someone else it's good for me what is that a good enough reason to be kind and compassionate or does your kindness and compassion have to be with no strings attached so it's best if there are no strings attached but it has to start somewhere and um and i think that it it makes sense to be compassionate but sometimes making sense isn't enough you know that we we tend to think that that we make decisions based on reasoning but it's much more than reasoning our decisions are based on on emotion and inspiration as well so that if you if you think about the three things together the the reasoning the emotion and the emotion being this feels right and the inspiration being i'm so inspired by what you do i'm going to do that as well that they all come together at the same time and and so not only can you reason that compassion is a good idea you can know it and feel inspired by it as well and and hopefully you know not only are we social animals we have the capacity to choose hopefully we provide a really good case for being more compassionate yeah you know she was saying that it reminded me of when i used to work in oldham right in the center of oldham pretty you know what would be called from the data deprived community low socioeconomic status and you know i used to get up back then i think this is pre-kits or maybe when my son was very young i'd want to get to work by about 7 15 or so just because to get through the blood results before i start seeing patients at eight o'clock and i used to also love missing traffic and i'd stop off on the way uh just in my my town at you know a local cafe that was open i'd stop off i'd get myself a coffee and initially i'd be getting it i think it's a takeaway but you know what you start to talk to people so i was there 6 30 along with my fellow caffeine addicts and you know we'd sit there and chat and you end up you know i didn't know them apart from through the coffee shop i didn't have their phone number their text number but we built up a bit of a rapport a bit of a you know a 6 30 a.m club like a community where you'd you'd actually really look forward to seeing them go you know how was that yesterday and i i'm sure that changed how my day went down even though if i may not get home till 8 pm that night that little dose of compassion and connection i think would get me through some very stressful days as a gp yeah i mean it's heartening isn't it it's heartwarming those moments even those those light moments where you have a gentle chat with someone they're heartwarming we feel it and it sustains us and and what's great is that that sense of heartwarming is not just with you but it's everyone involved in it and and you start to gather there because you know you're going to meet some friendly people that's a great story yeah it's just and i'm sure people listening to this or watching it on youtube will also if they think about it in their own life they'll know those little moments and i've heard you speak i heard your ted talk which is brilliant i really hope people at the end of this go and listen to it it's uh it's uh it really is wonderful and i think some of that data you just went through you presented didn't you i remember when that slide came up um what was it it was it was which interventions have the most impact on was it on longevity or your reduced risk of getting ill so on the technical side of it it's the odds ratio of mortality and and that's uh what does that mean for people who don't understand that exactly that means what are your chances of dying with the different types of intervention of dying prematurely and obviously that if you give up smoking you reduce your risk of dying significantly but not as much as social relationships and it likewise with diet exercise and the one that that tickles me the most is the the blood the drug treatment of high blood pressure because because high the impact of treating high blood pressure on your risk of dying prematurely is dwarfed by the impact of social relationships and uh and by the way as you and i both know if you have good social relationships you know that's your oxytocin spinning around your body your blood pressure drops so maybe you don't even need the treatment so much i think the first three like there's a graph on there and you plotted out beautifully and the top three things were all related to relationships social relationships and drug treatment of high blood pressure was right you know it has an impact but it was dwarfed compared to that and for people listening to this if there's any health care professional or i know a lot of medical students and junior doctors also listen guys you know how hammered homer is that you know properly treating blood pressure will have an impact on reduced heart attacks reduce strokes etc etc what julian is saying is based upon the data your social relationships the impact that will have dwarfs the impact of drug treatment of high blood pressure so i don't think any of us are saying don't treat high blood pressure but i think we're just trying to elevate the importance of compassion and relationships basically to the very very top of the pyramid right that's it and and something i've come to realize recently is that that actually the treatment of high blood pressure is quite a good model for bringing compassion and social relationships into the therapeutic environment because if you think about it if you're treating high blood pressure what you're doing is the first thing is you're screening you're identifying people who who've got high blood pressure so you you measure everyone's blood pressure and when you find it elevated you prescribe a treatment and then you follow up with the treatment to see whether the blood pressure has come down or not and you alter the treatment until you get the required response well why not take that same model with social about social relationships into your routine clinical practice so what about making a routine assessment of your patients about what their social relationships are and then think about what you can do about that in in within the consultation because it's more effective than most of the medicines we use so why not bring it in as a matter of routine and and and we know from froome that the results of when you do that is absolutely transformational well let's go into freedom right because what happened in froome is remarkable a lot of people listening to this probably won't be familiar with what happened there so maybe you could paint the picture for us what was going on with room before what did you and colleagues introduce and what was the profound impact that you saw okay so uh froome is a market town in somerset which is a county in the southwest of england um it's a town of 28 000 people in a a county of 500 000 people and it's it's always had something of an independent streak about it going back through the years and and even the last two election cycles has had independent town councillors there are no political party members who make up the town council and um at one point a number of the local gp practices combined together and there's an incredibly good natured sensible clear thinking gp called dr helen kingston and and she wanted to uh try and find a way of uh having moved to a large practice of making sure that that care was coordinated that there was good exchange of information between the practice members and at the same time she understood that so much of what we do as doctors is not related to drug treatment and wanted people to feel supported by their community so what she did is that she she employed jenny hartnell who's got a background in community development and jenny started a community development program in the town of froome but from within the medical center and then she combined the two and and we can go into more detail if we have time about what the community development involved but needless to say it was really about bringing the community together and making use of the incredible wealth of resources are present in every community and then if people are feeling lonely or isolated which is very very common and not and is worse in illness in fact then there's a way of connecting that community resource to what happens inside the medical practice so i'll give you an example to to demonstrate it and i talk about this in the book there's a lady called kathy who who was a businesswoman who got um a very severe form of acute rheumatoid arthritis and she lived in through she lives in froome and she's got a dog which is really important to her because she walks a dog first thing in the morning and she's got two children and she didn't really know the people around her that that well and the rheumatoid arthritis actually put her in a wheelchair within the space of three weeks and her whole life was devastated so she went to the doctor and said look i need a sense of hope that this isn't my life from now on and so and so the doctor said uh okay look i'm going to get you to see a health connector a health connector is somebody who is trained in motivational interviewing but is not a health professional and so rose a health connector went to see kathy and and um and said what do you want and kathy said i need to meet some other people who are going through this because i need to know that i'm not stuck and ro said i got just the thing and so kathy goes off first of all to the self-management group for people with chronic disease that's in the medical center and then she goes from the self-management to the pain management to the exercise out into the community and then she's connected to this incredible wealth of people of all the stuff that's going on in the community whether it's talking cafes which is what you had down your coffee shop or whether it's a knitting group or an art group or a healthy walking group or whatever it is and and kathy makes this journey from um from being somebody who was relatively isolated and focused to being somebody who is deeply engaged in the community and she describes the outcome of it about how she has got friends for life and she knows that they are there for her and she is there for them and and her life is transformed not only does she regain her health she regains her happiness and that the the combination of the the medical treatment of her disease with this wealth of support transforms her life when you say she regains her health right so she gets tapped into that when she's been diagnosed and i think she said she's in a wheelchair so when you say she's regain her health what what happens i mean what what does she get to what's her pain like what's her mobility like so she her pain and her mobility improve and obviously some of that is related to um treatment of her disease but her well-being improves her sense of social connectedness her sense of excuse me who's around her who her friends are her joy in life her reason for living everything is transformed and and so it's a personal journey of of increasing health and well-being and transformation what's interesting julian for me as you described her improvements there is that we started talking about pain and mobility and of course the medical treatment may have helped that but i i also have seen enough to know that actually it could also be a lot of the other stuff as well the feeling of connectedness can can absolutely reduce pain in my experience but you said at the end her you know her joy in living her love for life that all that sort of stuff the kind of softer stuff that often in medicine we don't measure but in many ways that's the most important part of being alive the most important part of being a human being on planet earth is how much fulfillment how much joy do we get day to day whereas i really feel that medicine has possibly without realizing it become very reductive and we measure blood tests and we do pain scores now of course reducing pain is really important and can improve people's quality in life but i think we've overvalued a lot of those um i guess more objective parameters at the expense of potentially some of these subjective ones i mean i you know obviously i agree with you and and my clinical background is that of a palliative care physician so pain is something i'm so for those who don't know what palliative care is i looked after people with terminal illnesses mostly cancer but it applies to any kind of illness and and of course you know pain is a significant significant part of it but when when you're treating people in pain day to day their mental state is is has a profound impact on their sensation of pain and if you just use medication to try and control their pain you're never going to get completely on top of it but if you start to deal with what matters most in life and and what matters most is so often the people we know and love in the places we know and love you know that if you start to work with all of that then a similar kind of transformation that happened to kathy can take place and of course if people are feeling loved and secure then their anxiety goes down their pain levels go down and actually you know then you start producing all the things that we naturally produce as human beings including oxytocin and our endorphins which are the the morphine type compounds that we naturally produce inside us yeah i mean i can't get that out of my head that your biochemistry your biology your physiology changes when you have close social connections when you're compassionate someone else or they're compassionate to you it matters so much and i think you know as i said to you in the kitchen just beforehand you know i i sort of get sent so many books these days and often i don't even get to look at them what's in them but there's something about yours that just lit lit me up inside you know the compassion projects a case for hope and human kindness from the town that beat loneliness i was just right i'm straight in you know i i just couldn't stop reading it it's it's it's it really is where personal professional all of my interests basically collide on this topic it's something i think a lot about particularly as my public profile that's grown and i communicate a lot on social media with people and i want to talk about social media because i understand that apart from a minimally used twitter account i'm not entirely sure you do much which is possibly why you look so happy well fit despite having worked for over 40 years as a doctor um but i i very much always lead with compassion and that means you won't get as much growth as other people who don't because you won't because it you can if you go divisive and you go with sort of toxic kind of messaging you get all the engagement you get all the sort of you attract that kind of um you you attract those kind of responses as well you really trigger people and i want to be part of the solution i want to i want to try and you know as gandhi says be the change that you want to see in the world right so there's a lot out there that we feel we can't change we can't control but i guess we can all control whether we choose compassion or not can't we i i exactly and and i think you're doing a great job and and i think when we we look around us that we can put our compassionate spectacles on and and see whether there's the presence or absence of compassion and and so often when you look at what happens in social media or what happens in the media in general or if we're hearing about politics or business or environment and and we've got our compassion glasses on we see that it's absent and and it's heartbreaking to see and so that what i hope is that that actually we provide a really good argument to say this is down to us as individuals that that within our life we can choose to be more compassionate in in any given situation we're in whether we're at home dealing with the kids or down the shops or in our workplace actually at any moment we have the choice to be compassionate or not and if we choose compassion not only is it good for us it's good for everyone around us and so in a way the heart of all of this is down to an individual level it's about each person and every person choosing to be just a little bit more compassionate because i guarantee that once you start you'll never stop why does this matter so much to you is this something that you felt as a kid as a teenager or was it your experience as a palliative care doctor you know seeing people towards the end of their life you know what was it or was it a combination so it's interesting that you say that and it's something that i've thought about a lot and i can remember it being important as a child like wanting the world to be a better place and and and actually most kids are like that actually the uh children have got a good sense of what's fair and what isn't fair and and i somehow uh clung on to that i don't know why and and that was my motivation as it is for i think everyone who goes into anything to do with healthcare is that they have this this basic motivation to try and do good to try and help and what i found was that that it was central to what i felt was most helpful and uh it so when i went into medical school it was it was back in the day you know and and um it was the time of uh margaret thatcher funnily enough and that point where the health service really starts to get constricted and disinvestment and and health service at that time was extremely hierarchical and you know the doctors were these kind of magical figures and and it it felt very uncomfortable to me and i took a diversion away from medicine for a few years to study acupuncture and osteopathy particularly because um they seem to embody somehow a greater sense of this compassion and working with people and all of the complexity of people but i also felt like there was something valuable in there and and i got drawn into palliative care which is a place where where that compassion is particularly strong and vivid uh so for whatever reason it's always been with me and and i've found it's it's carried me through and led me into you know these the outcomes of froome were totally unexpected but the reason for doing it was to give people the best treatment and and and so it's kind of fortunate circumstances where what's interesting about froome is that there are some really tangible measurable improvements which are groundbreaking through the application of compassion on a population based level have you had interest because what was what was done in freedom is remarkable i remember the first or second prescribing lifestyle medicine course that i and one of my colleagues dr panda teaches to doctors and other healthcare professionals about how to personalize the lifestyle interventions for their patients not only is prevention but also as part of the treatments and we put up a slide actually from one of the first guardian articles i think that actually spoke about the working frame which we thought was just incredible to showcase that to doctors um but you know it would seem it was so groundbreaking you would almost make the draw the conclusion that everyone should be knocking on your door going well like we want those results in our village in our town whether that's in the uk or beyond so what kind of interest and what kind of knocking on the doors have you had well a lot and from from that article which was written by george monbiot in the guardian we got worldwide interest and literally from every continent we had people ringing us up saying tell us about it and it takes time for things to get off the ground um and and the pandemic hasn't helped but we've got interest from all over the world where people are starting these kind of projects in particular there's a lot of interest in australia and new zealand and scandinavia as you might imagine they're quite sensitive to all of this and uh there are projects starting in in colombia and the us so um there's a lot of interest we have we have projects running in wales that that one article amazingly had a generated a huge amount of interest yeah it's unsurprising really because what you're offering is reduced hospital admissions reduced emergency attendances you know improved quality of life scores reducing healthcare costs basically but at the same time improving outcomes which seems to be the holy grail for any healthcare system around the world but but what's fascinating is the way you're doing it it's almost the opposite of how medicine and how society has gone worthy and i know i keep making this point but i think about it a lot so everything's quite reductive now medicine i feel for all its benefits some of the i think unintended consequences of super specialism is that we we reduce everything down to this blood test or this body part we don't see the connections it's all very individualistic right i'm going to see you and give you your plan and i get that and i see the merit in that but it strikes me as that what you're offering is it's almost the complete opposite it's almost saying there's too much pressure on you as an individual to sort your own health out let's get you in a switched on community where you can talk about it where you can actually connect and foster these loving um intimate relationships and it strikes me as that you're sort of saying by doing that by putting the focus on community rather than the individual actually individual health improves right is where we're putting the focus i think that i think that's right i mean you know you can think about a number of ways in which that's expressed so so you can think about things like the men's shed and the women's shed and and you don't need to be ill to go down the men's shed you know it's something you can join in and and if you like it said love laughter and friendship that happens along the way what is the manchester united we don't know yeah okay so the men's shed is uh it's a in fact a national association and it's where men can go because men like building things and i've got that weakness as well i'm forever down the builder's yard you know picking up bits of wood but but of course people have a lifetime of experience and and and so people like to share and pass that experience on but it's also a place where people can get on and do stuff and make things and and find that love and laughter on the way and and what happens is is transformational in those moments so um one guy for example um talks about how um he he had a a stroke and he was really angry afterwards a kind of active guy and then his wife leaves him and he's at rock bottom and he goes down the men's shed uh just for something to do and and he makes friends there and he says you know and tears up as he's saying it he says well uh whenever i ask somebody to have a cup of tea or something like that they never say no and he says i never thought i'd have friends like that again and that's not because somebody is ill that's just the daily life anyone can join in and that keeps you healthy keeps you out of hospital keeps you sane but then if you think about you have a physical or some kind of mental illness and you think that if you can you can bring in that community support it makes a huge difference and and just to give you an example you know you think about something like diabetes and what five percent of our population have got uh maturity on diabetes and uh a further five percent are pre-diabetic they're at risk of developing diabetes well so that's so much to do with lifestyle and it's all very well for a doctor to say uh actually you've got to cut down your carbohydrates start eating sugar and but what on earth does that mean to somebody who might not know how to cook properly might not have a shop nearby may feel overwhelmed by the price of food and who may feel lonely and isolated because they've got this disease and what do they do now well if you start thinking about how you can add in community resource to that then you can start thinking about well what about other people who are in the same situation and and what about if they figured out what to cook how to cook if you're if you're a widower and you never did the cooking what on earth do you do and where do you buy the food from and how do you buy fresh food that's cheap and if you do it together is it easier and what about if you start cooking for each other and and then you start building these relationships and not only do you lead a healthier lifestyle you get all the benefits that we've been talking about that happen with your biochemistry and your physiology and everything from from the love and laughter that you develop with the people around you yeah i love the way you you bring in type 2 diabetes because yes lifestyle plays a huge role in the development of it but also how we might treat and manage it and a lot of the focus tends to go on diets and i understand that but we gotta not we've got to make sure we take in that big picture right um because i think it's so important well it's it's it's interesting when you think about it as well from the perspective of how can policy support this and and there's a move towards this now with uh with the development of primary care networks which is a uh changing the way that the the gp practices work and they work more in in harmony together but as well they've got something called link workers and and link workers are uh people who do what's turned social prescribing and i've got to take a little detour here because whenever the whenever the term social prescribing comes up i have a kind of involuntary shudder uh because uh it's it is the term itself suggests that you can have a prescription that you give to somebody to deal with your social life it's like okay i don't know about that i'm a doctor i don't know about that i'm going to give you this prescription and that will sort it all out and and it's it's uh it's got a paternalistic edge to it and actually it's probably the most powerful thing you can do but but and so the term that i think describes it much better is compassionate communities about being connected to your communities so that the the this uh there's been a greater development of trying to embed this stuff into the infrastructure of how health services work so there is a greater recognition of the the impact of relationships but it's it's still got a huge way to go and and it is uh how do you change that down to the level of the individual consultation and and what you do with communities where you nourish this community spirit in fact the way that i've tried to describe this is is that you can think about that management reduction of symptoms whether those you know in from the palliative care perspective we talk about the physical the social the psychological and the spiritual is that you want to reduce the negative impact of those symptoms but but actually that doesn't give you health and well-being that doesn't give you joy in life simply just treating the symptoms is not enough and and that if you go for the joy the love the well-being the compassion the things that give you meaning in life actually you the whole compassionate community intervention is a way of enhancing all of that and that actually it not only does it make people feel joyous and better and connected and meaningful it has a profound impact on health as well and that impact is bigger than the medication so and i think that you know what the message that i think both you and i are trying to get across is that that actually if we concentrate on that and we enable and enhance that not only do people reduce their burden and risk of disease they enjoy life yeah i mean i love the way you talk about our own personal experience i think it's we sometimes forget about that to tune into how we feel but you know let's let's flip it around like when you were trying to define compassion so talking about suffering or let's think about you know and i challenge anyone who's listening or watching this right now to actually do this and think about when was the last time you had an argument with someone let's say your spouse your partner uh your child or you left a a snidey comment on someone's post on social media how did you feel afterwards right let's say you were right and you got your point across how'd you feel afterwards even if in your head you were right if there isn't that compassion you don't feel good you can't stop thinking about it you think you know you know we don't we don't feel good about ourselves when we haven't let's say displayed that compassion to our partners or even to people online right so it's not just that we know it feels good when we are compassionate to someone else we also know how negative it feels and how toxic it can be when we don't do it when we do the opposite right i i mean let's think about that in terms of of of childhoods of about what happens if we're if parents in particular through their own life circumstances are struggling and maybe they've had difficult childhood childhoods themselves and and life has conspired against them and and the care and the compassion for children is not as strong as it should be and maybe there's there's not so much care and maybe there's anger and sometimes physical and mental abuse is that when we see that go on again and again and again over a year over years and years as children a child trying to find that place in the world that has a profound impact on how the lives of those children unfurl and the ability for people to have good healthy relationships when they're suffering with this burden of stuff that's happened in their past is really tricky and you know this uh uh acute childhood events is is a a really well described field about as as the number of events start to accumulate that has really profound effect on on people's mental and physical health and even to the point of dying young and drug and alcohol abuse and all of those kind of things yeah and and having obesity and carrying excess weight you know there's a strong strong link between adverse childhood experiences i think it was dr vincent felletti i think who's the lead in that study i think so so what about we start to add in compassion to all of that and what about we we add in the community resource and rather than saying oh you've got to be more compassionate which is actually not helpful and and because it's like i'm just trying to do my best you know what about going actually there are other forms of support that you can get from the people around you and you can develop friendships and find solutions to the many problems that you're facing which which in a way is the essence of community development is is that we say that that communities if when communities come together um as as cormac russell of uh nurture development says it's about what's strong not what's wrong that we build relationships and and we recognize the strengths in all of us and we start to create the warmth of the environment that where we can start to solve the problems that we face and it doesn't matter whether those problems are are financial or environmental or whatever comes to the surface communities acting together through the warmth of human relationships is how we get the transformation and it goes back to what you were saying this is not so much the individual but it's people together it's communities and and that the reason why that's so powerful is because that's how we evolved we evolved in communities that that it's a uh a really important part of human evolution and uh i would add in one other thing here is that that um that we have been led to believe that acquisition is the way of happiness that we have if we have beauty if we have lots of goods that's how we're going to become happy and there's an interesting point at which that becomes much more explicit in particular in the capitalist world where this guy called edward bernays who who was a nephew of freud said that he wrote this book called propaganda back in 1928 and he said that we can't wait to persuade for people to buy stuff we have to persuade them to buy stuff and and and from that moment onwards you have the marketing industry which has just grown and grown and yet and yet in my work as a palliative care physician you know i talk to literally thousands of people about dying and about what was important in their lives and and often uh through the course of the illness people felt a diminished sense of self because they couldn't do the things that they recognized recognized as being important to them and and the but with the people around them they appreciated the people around them for their love and their care and their friendship and so we tend to have this kind of dual standard of thinking about acquisition as being meaningful for ourselves but we appreciate the people around around us for the quality of the character they have it sounds like you're saying that we judge other people differently from the way we judge ourselves precisely i mean it was a it was a conversation i had with nearly every one of my patients i would say look have a think about the people who you really appreciate the most and why you appreciate them and and people would say it's about the about their love about their kindness and that would say has the love and the kindness diminished in you even though you're not able to do the things that you usually do and of course the love and the kindness is still there and and i would say we don't need to be terminally ill to appreciate that that's something that we can do now in our lives if if you like the people around you for the qualities of their character these it's kind of at the heart of it all is in like well you can you can develop those qualities yourself you don't have to become a saint you can just do a little bit and become a slightly kinder and more compassionate person that makes me think about compassion and what we really mean because those patients i guess then are saying yeah you know i i can't you know what you know i don't really have any value anymore because i can't go and meet them or i can't go walking with them anymore or whatever it is but you're sort of reframing again yeah but you can give love you can be still be the friend that is probably all they ever valued in you anyway it wasn't whether you go walking with them or not so i guess there's another point here when we talk about compassion are we talking about compassion to others or actually are we talking about compassion to ourselves well both actually and and um um having written the book i started out with podcast as well which i've called survival of the kindest and one of the one of the people i interviewed was uh jason mills and jason um is uh he lives in australia and he he comes from a um a diverse background of uh papua new guinea and philippine and and his his childhood was a little difficult and then he met a compassionate nurse and it inspired him to go into nursing and then jason went on to do a phd in compassion and he talks about the role of self-compassion and about how self-compassion helps us to be more compassionate in other words that compassion is applicable if you lie universally and we have to apply it to ourselves you know just on a reasonable level we have to we have to manage our lives if you people may think that if you're really compassionate you exhaust yourself so that you've given everything to everyone else and then you can't do anything because you're exhausted and actually that doesn't work we have to be realistic we're human beings you know we have limitations so so how do we how do we have compassion for who we are and what we do how do we appreciate the value and how do we share that with the people around us well i'm so interested about these conversations you would have had with thousands of patients near the end of their lives i'd love to hear more about that i mean were there what were some of the other themes you know what did people repeatedly say the same thing or did they repeatedly not say particular things you know and i guess how might i and the listeners learn from what people have learnt at the end of their life and i guess the natural extension of that is what did you learn from that and has it changed the way that you live your life that's a great question so i'll give you two two examples uh so uh one is that the the people who used to impress me the most were the people who came to the end of their lives and and they weren't great businessmen or didn't have massive achievement but they approached death with a sense of peace and when i asked them about that they said well i've had a good life i've i i've had good people around me i've had great children i love my love my husband and my wife and and i feel satisfied with the way that life went and to be so open and face death in this peaceful way to me was really inspirational and impressive and then i remember one gentleman who i treated who was a great international business leader and and he was talking about um talking about this subject and his his wife was there and he was saying i i can't do i can't run my businesses and who am i and and so we talked about appreciating people for who they are and why loved his wife and and all of that and then his wife popped up and said people loved you uh for who you are not because you were a great business leader and she encapsulated that so perfectly just the way that she said it and and of course he understood about the powerful impact of the kindness and the quite a lot of the the physical and emotional suffering that he had got better quite quickly and and he was able to die peacefully with that and and i think that it used to be um a daily lesson for me so we got three kids of course i love my kids and and and we i'd go home and some days and after you know particularly intense day i might get home and and there's mayhem at home and it's all going on and you know all of that and and i would just say look whatever it is it doesn't matter and they would look at me and they go no yeah but i can see that's the case you know and and so like it it absolutely gives you a sense of what's important in life and what's not quite so important yeah i think many of us myself included need that reminder nice to learn from people at the end of their lives about what truly is important i think we we get so caught up in small things don't we about you know is this right or is that wrong or you know god that shouldn't have happened all this and actually when it's all said and done it it comes down to connection and relationships yeah that's what we value the most uh it's amazing i remember when i started off as a gp and it was i can't remember some sort of social event or uh i don't know a conference i just remember chatting to a lot of the older gps and they would all say i just remember one moment they all said you know one thing they wish they'd done and i've heard this so many times from older gps i wish i hadn't worked so hard and i wish i spent more time with my family i i never ever once heard anyone say i wish i'd spent more time at work it never ceases to amaze me that you know one thing when i one thing i say a lot particularly when i'm teaching doctors is i say connect first educate second and it's something i've learned through my years of clinical practice i remember early on as a gp sometimes i'd be a bit flummoxed when a patient came in you know i didn't have maybe as much experience as i wanted what the symptoms they were coming in with and the protocol that i had next to me in terms of how to treat them didn't seem to marry up some of the time and i thought that just doesn't feel right so i would just chat to them right i would make sure i took time to connect so that they felt heard and that's a basic human need for anyone frankly whether it's a patient doctor relationship a husband-wife relationship parent child we all want to feel hurt and you know going back to the talk it's a patient relationship the amount of times doctors say to me oh patients don't do what i tell them to do and i'm like well even that phrasing kind of tells me a lot there you know if you're telling a patient what to do i don't blame them for not doing it right because no human ever does something when they're told to do something and that's where this whole idea of connect first educate second comes like i i have genuinely found um and i used to say oh i'm really lucky you know my patients are really compliant but actually i don't think it is just luck i think it actually when you look at it is if you take time to connect and that patient feels heard then they're open to listening to what you have to say but if they don't feel heard or they feel you're just trying to shove a treatment plan down their face and get them out the door and i get there are pressures there are time pressures of course the impact is going to be limited right connect first and we we know that that is in any aspects of our life when people know how much we care then they're interested in adhering and i think it was in what i was researching uh you before you came today i think i heard a talk or an interview where you speak about four qualities i think compassion love friendship and laughter but you said without compassion you can't get the other three i wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit so i mean i i i try and relate this to personal experience and because then we have that intuitive sense about what's right or what's not right and if we think about the relationships around us we know that if the person we're talking to um doesn't care for us is not interested in our well-being you know we have a uh an incredible uh intuition of about who to trust and who not to trust if that basic compassion is absent then that's not a relationship that will that will develop or or will last there's a really great book by a woman called susan pinker called the village effect the impact of face-to-face relationships and she describes from the cradle to the grave about how we devote so much of our time and so much of our effort in in developing what's good safe social relationships even from the moment where we're born where the first thing we see is our mother's eyes hopefully if all goes well and and but then you know that one of the very uh one of the first things that children learn to do is mimic the facial expression uh in the person in front of us and um and then we then we just as we grow up we are learning all of these social skills all the time we have incredible sensitivity to it and we're trying to figure out our place in the world so so for example one of the people i i interviewed was paddy whittle and paddy is a uh documentary filmmaker and he did a beautiful documentary uh along with my sister about schools and they just they just put into they did filming from the playground and and they did it a distance and they followed this one girl in particular um and they were tr who you could see the struggle she was having to find good social relationships and and what happened in the playground and how much of the time was devoted to can i be in with this group or or that group or am i on my own and the heartbreaking rejection that takes place and and i think that that you know it goes on you know and like paddy paddy went on and and did the same work in prisons and in ethiopia and looking at how much we our whole human development is based around trying to find our place in the world it's so important to us is that documentary available online to watch is it uh there's one called boys and girls and i'm not sure if it's still available but the one on prisons is still available and and it's beautiful because he's looking for that humanity and looking for uh those expressions of kindness and humanness that come out in places where we might not expect them yeah well we'll find the link we'll put it in the show notes i definitely like to watch that it's interesting you know you you make the case in the book you make the case you know many on many occasions that it's kind of baked into us it's baked into our dna it's who we are as humans and i think we really saw that in march and april 2020 when you know before anyone really knew what was happening with the kind of restrictions and the lockdowns what we did see was kindness and compassion returning into everyday life people looking out for their neighbors doing the shopping for their neighbors you know little things but i guess it was if you think about it why was it so striking to us it was so striking to us because it's so rare now in terms of it's i don't want to say it's right i don't want to believe it's rare i guess somewhere along the line and as you say this capitalist society where we've been encouraged to buy more get more things get more stuff you know get these houses insulate ourselves off from people around us we've kind of lost it somewhere haven't we that actually it's it's who we are as humans i think that's right and and it's what what's interesting about froome to come back to that is about you know you can ask a question about can you can you do that on a population basis can you take an area and and start to develop the things which create a greater sense of community and the answer is yes you can that you can work at the ground level and bring people together streets and neighborhoods creating compassionate streets and neighborhoods looking out looking over the garden fence to check on your neighbor and then thinking about the things that interest you and it doesn't matter what it is because there'll be other people who are interested in the same thing and then and then thinking about okay well why don't we have all of that information available so i'll describe briefly about what went on because it's so amazing and that that um so so then you've got well there are all these groups in the community like in any community there are hundreds and hundreds of of these groups going on whether it's knit and natter or people going for walks or book clubs or this isn't free anywhere yeah it happens everywhere you know and and so why not gather that all of that information together so that you can stick it on a easy to use web page so that people can access it including the medical practice so if you have somebody who comes in and says i'm isolated and lonely or if you're in a cafe and somebody talks about being isolated and lonely you know exactly where to go to get that information but then what about there are many people who don't want to belong to a group and many people you know they said to jenny who organized the community development service i don't want to go to a group i just want to talk to people so so jenny went oh no we'll have a talking cafe so she develops talking cafe down the cheese and grain on a monday morning you know it's just a and it's a table with talking cafe and people just gather around and then people who come from the groups whether it's patrick from the men's shed or the walking group they can be there as well and then they can introduce people ask questions okay so now you've got the talking cafe and you've got the web directory well why don't we why don't why don't we train people in the town to be able to access this information they know the stuff that's on the website and they know that they they know about the talking cafe they know about health connections and end it so the next thing is that jenny starts a program of community connected training these are people who are just know about what's going on in the town so so so far 700 people have been trained as community connectors in froome then we know that on average they have 20 conversations a year about how the people of the town can connect up to the people of the town that's 14 000 conversations a year of of compassionate conversations in a town of 28 000 people you know and going back to david hamilton each one of those little conversations is a little explosion or beacon of compassion with oxytocin and the ripples and what that means is that that when you go to the town of froome whether it's you're in a cafe or in the library or as a community support officer or a receptionist or anyone might be a community connector we're all community connectors in fact is that you have this sense of people are listening out for you and they're with you so fruma's got this reputation of being a friendly town so people are now moving to froome because it's a friendly town yeah i mean it's amazing yeah it is amazing i mean there's so many thoughts going through my head one of them is uh you mentioned the website where people can see all the things that are available including the medical practice so that made me think that's so beautiful because and again i i just to check i've interpreted this correctly but it seems then to me that the the gp practice is just one part of a whole raft of interventions that are available rather than us oh i'm not well let me go to gp first and then from there get tapped in it's like well hold on a minute maybe maybe going to my gp isn't the right first step is that right is it so it's just yeah and i love that i love that it's less focus on the doctor and the medical practices okay what else is available the other thought i had is you mentioned these community connectors i think you said it's about 700 and also that kind of we're all real really community connections that's the beauty of it but i wonder are some of these kind of official community connectors are they ones who've struggled themselves and have seen the benefit and then they want to give back because it would strike me that if you were lonely and you got involved and you got benefit so many people like that then want to give back and say well let me help that's it and that story about kathy that i told you earlier that she became a community connector and she's now a strong advocate and connecting people up in her community there's people helping people that's it you know yeah it's so simple isn't it it's so lovely it's so basic it's so innate but but think about this like you're you're sat as a gp and and uh you're you're you're seeing a patient and you know you're a human being you've got in you've developed this incredible sensitivity to what's going on with someone else it's a natural part of you growing up you know you have a nice environment and nice family and you learn all these healthy relationships and you're sensitive and then you know whether the person in front of you irrespective of of what they've come in for you know in on one level what's going on with them the difficulty that you have as a doctor is how on earth do you do something about it well what about we make it really really easy for you and and that you have the health connectors the people who work one-to-one the people who are trained in in um motivational interviewing and you know that if somebody's really struggling and they can't see the wood from the trees you can go i i don't have to sort this out but i know someone who can or you you can see that the person is is outgoing and really wants to get out there and do something and and you can go well look let's have a quick look on the web directory which is really easy to use and i can print this stuff out for you and i can connect you up with all of these resources whether it's if you're homeless all the stuff that there is for homeless people or whether you know it doesn't matter what it is that all the hundreds of different all the listeners can go to the health connections mending website and explore it and see the stuff that goes on in every community and what that means is that in terms of your consultation actually you're able to address the issues that matter most to people and you're able to do it within the time frame of what you're doing and in fact it saves time because you don't have people coming back again and again for the problem that you're not addressing yeah and that's this you know that's disempowering for doctors as well because a they feel they don't have enough time b if they're taking the whole weight of that patient's problems on their own shoulders and they're unable to help because they keep coming over and over again and actually the problem ain't necessarily that physical symptom the problem is the environment that the loneliness right so you actually help i think doctors get their love back for their profession that's it by taking the pressure off well so so we started a project in um an iron beverage health board in the poorest areas of um of gwent and we say to the doctors you know when we're talking about implementing this project is you know we've got three outcomes the first one is improving the lives of our patients the second one is improving working lives so people get back that love for their work and and the third one is you know reduction in cost but you know so what you know and and we had gps you know just to give you a clue that that some of the in those in those deprived areas in in the welsh valleys you might have one or two gps for a practice of 10 000 people and and absolutely you know they can't employ gps and they're run ragged and their lives work life balance has gone way amiss and a number of months into the project they start finding that they're able to solve the problems that the patients are coming in with and that we've worked out about the bits that the gps do best in the bits that everyone else do best and then they start to say this is why i came into medicine 16 years ago this is i can now practice in the way that i want and i i think that you know for for those people who are listening who are health professionals this is about rediscovering your love for what you're doing rediscovering that that you're not left at the end of the day with a sense of emptiness because you haven't been able to give the care that you would want to give to solve the problems of your patients you find the joy and the love back in the work that you're doing yeah i i love that and it's something i'm so passionate about it's it's very similar to the feedback we get after our prescribing lifestyle medicine course a lot of the feedback we get is yes this has helped us change the way we practice medicine but the ones and that makes me happy but the real the thing wasn't really exciting me when they say you know i i i love my job again i love what you know i think on the second one we got an email on the monday morning in the private facebook group someone said that was a busy monday i've seen 42 patients and you know what i absolutely love that i feel like i've learned new tools on how to help my patients now and i think that's the the part that doesn't get spoken about enough actually i think a lot of healthcare professionals are frustrated they don't like 10-minute consultations they don't like that they're having to try and fix societal problems in the consultation room it's it's very disempowering um julie i wanted to ask you in froome with these resources with these community connectors what about young men um you know we know that young men males around the country are really struggling with mental health high suicide rates it's all very well if someone knows that they're lonely and feels isolated but i've had patients let's say 35 year old patients come in before young men who thought they were depressed and actually they were but actually it was it was depression secondary to loneliness and when i helped them get tap into a local community or they reconnected with friends who they just were too busy to see actually a lot of their depression simpsons went away so i guess what i'm trying to ask is men are typically known for not being that great at asking for help and looking for help did you have you know in freedom were there issues with uh accessing certain parts of the population who i guess may be more resistant to that help in the first place i think that's that's really a lot to do with uh your like your skills as a in a clinician if somebody is presenting to you um and thinking about how well can you uh how well can you listen and how how do people talk about their problems and and i i think that one of the the key bits of that is about what matters most to people so they might come in with a knee ache or a back ache or but can can you get that round to a conversation which says well what's going on in your life and what matters most to you and i think that the the process then becomes well what what is it that interests you and and this is where the community development side of it comes in because if you've had a program going on in the community where where there's lots of activities and lots of different kinds of activities and it doesn't matter what it is whether it's model railways or men's shed or sports clubs if you've got those things at your fingertips that you can access you can find out and and that that you can connect people into something that they're interested in and and like i was saying it's the stuff that happens along the way that makes a difference the interest is just how people gather but it's the love laughter and friendship that happens along the way that actually helps you solve those problems and it might be that you know that your problems are loneliness but you've also got a problem with debt or you've got a problem with with the the neighborhood you're in well well what about if you can connect people up so that they can start dealing with those problems as well yeah there's there's a fantastic example of the beacon housing estate in falmouth where a couple of health visitors went down there and uh to do health visiting and it's one of the poorest areas and massive deprivation and and drug and crime and young men feeling disconnected and isolated and and not knowing what to do and creating havoc around the place and they realized that that actually that being health visiting wasn't going to make any difference at all so what they did was they became community activists and they got the community together and and and said look what about why start having community meetings what is it that's going on and they would say we've been deserted by the police and by the council and so the next thing they did is they got the police and the council in and then and then the police and the council said well we've given up on you and they're going why have you given up on us and they started this process about re-nourishing their communities so that people could find a space and and felt a sense of belonging and the council estate becomes transformed through this process of of community engagement and and when you start when you start thinking like this the examples become so many there's there's like for young men you know boxing gyms might work really well there's this really innovative guy who started this thing called random crew he's a he's a dj i can't remember his name but i thought you're going to say run dmc that yeah yes rundom crew and he was somebody who uh came from a diverse background and um felt disconnected and isolated and he used to run through the streets of london at night so he thought okay i'm going to start a running club and so he starts this running club where all these people come together and start running together through the streets of london at night and it's what happens along the way that makes all the difference how they support each other how they see things differently the examples are so many i mean you're a fan of park one as well aren't you i am yeah yeah does uh frame have a park run uh i live down in uh prune does have a park run but i live down in cornwall and um and there's a very nice park run in the small town of helstone that i used to go to but um obviously since the since the pandemic it hasn't been going but it's just a lovely environment you know i mean parkway is i think is just a prime example of everything you're talking about right it's how community-based interventions are transforming lives and you know it's it never ceases to amaze me how impactful part run can be um even for non-runners even for people who just volunteer i've got a couple of patients who don't want to run they volunteer it's changed their life improve their mood they feel part of something greater than themselves there's a there's a lovely story about uh how park run started and i'm useless with names i've gotten the guy started but but he went to a pretty strict uh private school in south africa and he moved to the uk and when he was an adult and and he was saying his life was pants you know he he's he'd lost his job his girlfriend had kicked him out and he was live as a rock bottom and he just wanted to go running with his mates and he didn't want the heart regimes of you know being told what to do by by a very authoritarian trainer so his main thing was uh like we'll go and run around bushy park but we'll have a coffee afterwards and chat and we'll make it as easy as possible for people to join in and the first one was like 13 mates and he got this token and people could then um do the run and have the token on them and and and just meet up every week for a run and a coffee and then it spread because he made it so easy for people to join in and then other people started park runs and now there are park rooms all over the world 20 million people a week running five kilometers or walking it or whatever they can manage as long as they can just make it and be there and make friends it's it's great it is and i think the key there was he made it easy right we've got to make these things easy if we want people to do them it's what you know we've spoken about before on the show about you know how important it is to make things easy when people want behavior change but i think behavior change is interesting isn't it because when we talk about behavior change myself included we're talking about it on an individual level as this individual how do you create behavior change but actually it's a lot easier making behavior change when everyone around you is doing the same thing well yeah and you think about whatever you're doing you do it together doing together makes the biggest difference yeah i got another great example far away um uh is um i don't know whether you saw a film called dawn wall um i haven't yet it's it's a film about this guy who is obsessed uh by climbing this particular route in el capitan he spent seven years um preparing for it and initially he does it with his wife he's a great climber but then their relationship breaks down and and he chooses this he compares up with his other guy and they uh and and if you're uh this is a spoiler alert so if you don't want to hear this then just switch off for a little bit but but there's a point on the climb where he makes it across this particular pitch but his mate doesn't and they spend the next three weeks hanging on the side of the wall for this guy to try and make it and he can't make it and eventually they decide okay look we i'm going to go to the top you know and so the guy just beca his climbing partner becomes an aide but he's about to get to the top and and and tommy this guy goes you know it doesn't matter doing it without my climbing partner is meaningless and he gives it up and and he goes back and they and he says we're going to stay here until you've done this section again it's and and like he gives up this great ambition solely to be with his friend i've got i've literally i've got tingles all over my body hearing that because that's it isn't it yeah that's the essence of of living what what joy is it in doing it by yourself right it's if we think back to those special moments in our own lives are they are any of them really when we're truly alone or is it when we're with other people when we can share it right that's it there's another example that i love which is about the brownlee brothers and you know the the triathletes and and they're doing this race and it's you know alistair is beating johnny again and and you know the spanish guys between the two of them and and uh alice says getting to the finishing line and he sees on the finishing line he sees his brother stumble and fall just about not to make it across the finishing line so he stops and picks up his brother and loses the lead to the spanish guy just so that his brother can make it over the line you know giving it all up for that that that sense of being with the person you love you know it's just great yeah i mean that's probably a wonderful place to start winding up this conversation um julian i've really really value the work you're doing i think the book is amazing i would definitely think people should check out your podcast i think it's i've listened to a couple of episodes including the the one with the the chap from iraq who now lives in canada and i think i i won't give the spoiler away for that i think i'll link to it in the show now so people want to want to listen to that i hope the work you've done with your colleagues does spread around the world i think it needs to i think it's it's high time that it does just to finish off julian i call this podcast feel better live more because when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life and you know in your many years as a clinician you know many years as a human on this earth what are some of your top tips for people right at the end now for people who've heard who've been inspired by what you have to say but what can they now do in their lives that are going to improve them for the better i think the first thing is to really appreciate that you are already compassionate that we we swim in a sea of compassion and it makes we have to appreciate the fact that if we make somebody a cup of tea if we give someone some food if we do talk people down the shops if we give our friend a lift if we help out these things they're so close to us that they are happening all the time and it's really worth devoting some time to to just go through and appreciate that you have this incredible treasure of compassion that is going to help you live a happy long life and and then having appreciated that that you've got this natural compassion that you have this natural gift is to to come to the firm conclusion that that it's really worthwhile being compassionate and then think about how you can apply that in your life and that might be calling up the people that you love or telling the people that you love that you love them or or or looking over the fence and asking about how the neighbor is just chatting or seeing if there's something that you can do that will help or thinking about you know what is it you're interested in and are there other people interested in doing the same thing and and you know there's a fantastic story about an incredible edible your listeners might like to look at that you know about how three women just went why don't we start gardening producing vegetables for people and this international movement comes from it or if there's something that you're interested in and and nobody else is doing it do it with a friend just simple things you know it's like i was saying make small steps because once you start you will never stop julian thank you for making the journey up to my studio today thanks for the incredible work you do and i look forward to the next time we get to have a conversation i i look forward to it and i i think as well you know i think we're doing similar kind of work i think there's so much commonality between us and i i absolutely respect what you're doing and and your desire to help as many people as possible more than just giving medication and you know your books your tv programs all of those things they all contribute to this place of making the world slightly better so i have total respect for what you're doing thank you press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that i've picked out as a perfect follow-up remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you've lived more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 14,723

Rating: 4.9287534 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, compassion, empathy, health, longevity, julain abel, Frome, palliative care, loneliness, community, isolation, connection, quality of life, social relationships, end of life

Id: CUHYmbfHEVw

Length: 89min 10sec (5350 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020