Why You Should Quit Sugar, Appreciate Anxiety, and Experiment With Everything | Sarah Wilson

I was numb I'd gone into freeze mode I was manic I was depressed I was stuck all at the same time and it was just this kind of frozenness and I was I was lying on my bedroom floor facing one of those mirrored cupboard doors and I could hear the kids upstairs you know going to school and I could hear all the normal sounds of daily life and I was ready to check out I was I was ready to die and its really calm about it and and I looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn't see myself like it was like this emptiness and then this thought just dropped into my head and it just said what if you just kind of started again with just the clothes on your back and did it your way no one to bother you no one cares no judgment because hey you're willing to let go of everything so why not just start with what you've what you've got just hear and let's see what happens and that notion of an experiment let's see what happens became my motto for the next kind of let's say world ten years everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor better help an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient I hope you enjoy everyone welcome to hell theory today's guest is Sarah Wilson she's a multiple time New York Times bestselling author who was named one of the 200 most influential authors in the world two years running she also hosted the first season of MasterChef Australia helping it to smash records and become one of the most watched seasons of any show in Australian history as a passionate philanthropist she donated all of the profits from her thriving I quit sugar initiative and now she has dedicated herself to the tireless mission of helping to improve the health and mental health of people the world over a commitment that has earned her a passionate audience that measures in the millions and so the thing I found most interesting about your journey is the this sort of hard right from or what may seem like a hard right from talking about sugar or all the sort of bodily health stuff and then getting into anxiety with first we make must make the beast beautiful a it's an amazing concept super fascinating walk me through what is the beast and how do we make it beautiful and how did it come out of sugar so the beast is essentially anxiety and we have grown up you know our generation various generations around us have grown up with this notion that anxiety is a disorder it's a problem we've grown up with this idea that anxiety is something we should shut down we should tame we should really eliminate and I've got bipolar when I say I've got bipolar I've been diagnosed with bipolar and through the general DSM kind of you know format and obsessive-compulsive disorder and have had general anxiety since the age of 11 so I've had to grapple with this idea that you know I've got some kind of disease or disorder so I decided I was going to go off and try to investigate if there was another lens that I could see it through and I've been grappling with on off medication different approaches and I went off on a setting your journey to see if I could find a more beautiful way oh gosh it was from my 35 onwards okay yeah and by then I mean your career you're smashing it you're killing him there's so many things that I left out of your intro to being the editor of Cosmo and Australia yeah I mean this is like a string of successes even though they're clearly from reading your book there are times where this was absolutely debilitating but you're still able to to build a pretty thriving life which is what I want people to understand like there there's a an interesting notion that you bring to the table about basically you know I don't think you ever use these words with being a high functioning anxious person yeah no it definitely is use those words and I think what I wanted to do is was create a conversation around not just living with anxiety and these you know various so-called disorders but thriving and thriving because of them and throughout history that was something that was accepted to a certain extent so poets scientists artists philosophers the greatest thinkers including wartime kind of heroes politicians Winston Churchill and so on these people had bipolar an obsessive compulsive disorder define bipolar I think that's the one thing that maybe the average person doesn't have a complete grasp yeah it's a it's a mood disorder that's easy swing from mania through to depression sometimes in cycles as titles within a day sometimes over several months and also the way that I approach my disorder and my interpretation of our culture's understanding of mental disorders it's a little bit like a knotted ball of wool we have this expectation that with some kind of drug or some kind of right therapy we're gonna find that original thread and unfurl it and we'll live a nice smooth linear life right no aspect of life is like that and when you've got a mental condition that means you're particularly intense that ball of wool is really knotted and my aim in life is to loosen it up a bit right and create more space and you modulate certain aspects of your life so that you can there head off and hopefully find ways to use it as what I call in the book and a superpower I want to ask that so it's a pretty powerful perspective maybe the right word to be in the midst of this to have struggled diagnosed officially with childhood anxiety disorder to be diagnosed with Bipolar a 21-2 like sort of diagnosis after diagnosis it's it's very powerful to be able to step back and say I'm gonna intentionally change my perspective what gave you that insight was it you talk about pain being very powerful in the book was it like just sort of hitting a pseudo rock bottom and saying [ __ ] this like something has to change or well I think those two things I was well the maintenance and the meta answer is I was rendered choiceless and that's quite often how most humans make dramatic change it's actually something that has actually guided you to what I call the coldest sack of your existence and you get to that cold a sack and you've got to make a decision so at 34 I had quit my posters editor of Cosmo because I've got Hashimoto's and I was so sick I couldn't walk for nine months whoa yeah I was my head fallen out I'd put him it I think he's at the equivalent of 40 pounds in four or five weeks my nails in four or five weeks mm-hmm yeah yep and you know remember I came from a world of you know the red carpet life and photos and all of that kind of thing and defined in many way by the egoic stuff and then to become invisible fat hairless nail with no motivation no source of income and it got to a point where I wasn't able to leave the house I'd lost all my motivation I was desperate I was just in a state of desperation because you don't know what the hell is happening you're like I'm downward spiraling or well let's go back to that [ __ ] of wool right I was I had that thought and then I had the thought of I should be doing better and I'm a fighter you know leading up to this point I was doing sand running races 24-hour mountain bike races I was running to work and back every day I was having three to four hours sleep we'll have red wine each night two coffees in the morning and I had Hashimoto's disease at that stage and and interestingly talking about sort of been rendered choiceless I did a story commissioned a story on infertility and what's called the egg timer test which was a big thing back there a good time return eggs time it tests it is a it was a test that young women could do to see how many eggs they had left and how much time they had before they were not able to have children it's since been deemed highly inaccurate however I was the only person in the office was who was at the right time in their cycle to do that god damned test and so as life would have it I do this test and they say hey listen we hate to tell you but you are going through perimenopause and I was there for you're never going to be able to have children something seriously is going wrong with your hormones you need to get this checked out so I ignored that test because you didn't like the end I did not like the end zone and so I ignored it for six months until my health ran down to a point and basically I had no thyroid hormones and by the time I presented myself to a specialist they said I was weeks away from heart failure so that's how hard I went until I finally stopped and I crashed so to answer your question the first thing is my body stopped me for me that's how I see it now tell me more so what do you mean what what is the the hole that you're trying to fit into that wasn't you the rat-race the climbing the corporate ladder exactly it was that it was also that a type concept that I type construct that women I think in particular of my age my era we very much were of that mindset where we had to beat the boys and we had to almost take on a masculine physicality and masculine mindset and I guess it really a brazed my values because I grew up on a subsistence living property I've got very anti materialist values always have you know as editor of Cosmo and never owned a handbag I wrote a bike to work every day I never owned a hairdryer so yeah I was regarded as as odd within the building and that was okay for a while and then it was you know revenue was starting to fail as when magazines were starting to suffer and all became less about creating amazing content as about satisfying advertisers and that cycle has obviously tightened and tightened and tightened around the world now and I didn't think was right and there were things that I was having to do and decisions I was having to make that did not sit with my values and fortunately I've got a mechanism an internal mechanism that if I don't listen to my values it explodes out of me but yeah 34 after all of this happened the sickness totally living in this space of being redundant you know and invisible I want to stab you this time yeah what do you mean invisible well I was in the public eye and all of a sudden I was you know fat hairless infertile and what was physically in actually invisible in the sense that I was pretty much house bound okay and midst all of this this life hasn't my car was stolen my surfboard was stolen my bike was stolen Gudrun yeah it went on and on and to the point where it became comical and your friends drop off and I think with chronic illness it's you know very often said that at first you get a bit of love and attention and then you know over time it becomes monotonous for people you know there's no improvement monotonous for yourself and I just wasn't engaged with the world you know so I was invisible in that sense I wasn't down the street meeting strangers and saying hello to the barista who made my coffee because I wasn't leaving the house so there was a moment where I'd been awake for three days Oh God and I was lying on my bedroom floor a tremendous reason or what's going on well let's go back to that ball of wool analogy or even too weird let's imagine just all these thoughts are coming in and all thoughts are coming out yeah and when that happened the net kind of movement is zero I was numb I'd gone into freeze mode I was manic I was depressed I was stuck all at the same time and it was just this kind of frozenness and I was I was lying on my bedroom floor facing one of those mirrored cupboard doors and I could hear the kids upstairs you know going to school and I could hear all the normal sounds of daily life and I was ready to check out I was I was ready to die and it's really calm about it and and I looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn't see myself like it was like this emptiness and then this thought just dropped into my head and it just said what if you just kind of started again with just the clothes on your back and did it your way no one to bother you no one cares no judgment because hey you're willing to let go of everything so why not just start with what you've what you've got just hear and let's see what happens and that notion of an experiment let's see what happens became my motto for the next kind of let's say world 10 years and I literally got up and weird stuff started happening why just bang bang bang because I honestly didn't care I had nothing to lose and so I made a commitment to myself that I would remember that that's what I'd committed to I would start off again with just the clothes on my back and I would live by my values and I'll promise never to get caught up again and that's what enabled me to go off and explore things bring up His Holiness the Dalai Lama whoever it might be ask you know and asking questions and I just went and went and went and so first we make the best beautiful was an exploration of how you can do life differently without getting caught up and being stuck in that mold that square peg you know round hole being a square peg your ability to reframe I think is so important right now as mental health issues appear to be on the rise or some debate certainly in the the visibility of it the opportunity to help people who are struggling with it whether it's actually more people that have it or not I think is irrelevant being able to paint a new picture create a new perspective invite people to really experience their own life completely differently because they utterly change the frame is so powerful and you bring up an interesting point there Tom that there is a little bit of conjecture as to whether it is on the rise and it is I'm one of those people that does question it so if we're talking what I call everyday or fair enough anxiety that's on the rise so people just kind of being angsty and and so on in terms of disorders such as bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorder that's not necessarily on the increase it's been around about 4.0 1.2 to 1.4 percent of the population around the world throughout history which suggests and I point this out in the book that it's an evolutionary quirk that's kind of within the human sort of species to ensure our survival so that we don't we're not all just kind of lemmings following each other around the planet hunting and gathering there's some weirdos that go and invent the wheel or penicillin or you know lead a country to peace you know some of our greatest thinkers talk to me about anxiety as a driving force that was something I found really yeah well what I'd say is that if we go back that's the disordered anxiety in terms of everyday what I call fair enough anxiety the fight-or-flight response which is actually inherent to our survival that is perceived as being on the increase right because and this is I have two theories for it first of all I think that the way we live our life now emulates the anxious experience so toggling between screens running between activities being permanently distracted and feeling that we should be distracted focusing is kind of not cool you know learning thoroughly is not cool reading a newspaper article thoroughly it's just not what we do that emulates the same hormonal response in the brain the fight-or-flight response and so we are perceiving Electress life because we are living a lifestyle that that sort of creates that hormonal response so there's that aspect of things and also that a type bizi bizi bizi kind of notion is revered you know how are you I'm so busy you know well you know that means you're on track the second aspect of it is that we lack resilience so I don't think we've got an anxiety problem we've got a resilience issue especially amongst young people so we can't sit you know [ __ ] long enough to pass through it and kind of find a way of coping you've got to get vigilant you've got to get focused you've got to take responsibility you know I refer to having an anxiety disorder is carrying a shallow bowl of water around for the rest of your life and you have to ensure it doesn't get unstable because it'll start to slosh and then it'll get out of control and you'll end up spilling water all over yourself and loved ones and you've got to keep going back to the source since starting again and there's a responsibility that comes with having this condition and that's what I really try to instill in people so how can I ID be something that you can actually use as a force of good well one way we can perceive it is to understand the biology of it and how it all works in the brain and what's interesting is that excitement and anxiety stimulate the same chemical response in the brain and so there's some techniques in the book that I share where when I'm anxious I often choose I actually really go through a process of choosing to see it as excitement and quite often it is I think I've actually heard you talk to somebody maybe Sam Harris about this I'm one of your podcast it came up briefly it has definitely come up I this am a little conflicted about this and yeah it may be because I'm bad and bad at it and I'm very open to trying to get better it is anxiety for me is is like a self-reinforcing loop in the way that excitement is not and so there's something to anxiety that is far more sinister that's why I found your book so interesting is it was the first time where somebody said well whoa whoa whoa there's actually elements of this that can be very useful and one thing that it made me think of is this is gonna be weird roll with me for yeah is Kanye West now I don't know if he has anxiety or not I'd be a little surprised if he didn't have something approaching mania at times and you talked about how people that had this kind of disorder in the past would had at times in certain societies become shamans and things were because it allows him to they're ejected from the box they're there thinking so far out in like a different realm and when I think about what I have tried to cultivate one of the things I had to learn as an entrepreneur was to eject myself from the box to to be outrageous to to almost emulate things that from the outside like one guy wrote a DM to mean he's like hey bro I think that you have your you're manic depressive and he was like I think that you you're prone to mania and I was like that's so interesting because I've had to train myself to be able to do that to get outside the box so you look at somebody like Kanye West who lives outside of the box and you started to see wow it is a double-edged sword there's no question yeah but in terms of breaking frameworks in terms of like you said that Hashimoto's is terrifying as it is actually forced you out of a framework forced you out of a way of thinking left you in the cul-de-sac of your life no choices and so there is something really really the why do you why do you dispute the Joe yeah anxieties as excitement at times you know I will say this I think it's amazing advice I will only give you my limited experience having tried it and come up wanting so when I am really getting anxious there-there is it's a positive feedback loop and you talk about this in the book I laughed out loud when you say like being afraid leads you to run and running makes you feel better yeah with anxiety it only seems to make you more anxious and I was like yes that is exactly it it's so [ __ ] weird so the thing that makes me anxious is anxiety yeah so I can even get anxious just by being around someone who's anxious yeah because that like reminds me being cold which has the same physiological response makes me anxious and then like once the anxiety starts like it just [ __ ] snowballs and so my whole thing is I need to interrupt that mode and it may stem from a it doesn't quite feel like framing but it definitely stems from at least partly the the fear right so I'm thinking oh the anxieties gonna make me perform worse yeah that's bad and then I'm worse and so because I'm worse that's a reason to worry and so like I get that that there is very much a mental game yeah but the mental game has always felt like I need to interrupt the the positive green well what you're saying is that when you're anxious one of the things about being anxious these are very hard to stop and actually say to yourself okay let's can we rethink this let's reframe it as excitement it just doesn't tend to happen I totally get that there's a couple of things in terms of that notion of I mean the worst thing about anxiety as you say is that we get anxious about being anxious and then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious and so on and so forth and there doesn't seem to be an endpoint with hunger we can eat most of our pain can be satiated with something else with anxiety there doesn't seem to be something that is the endpoint that is the association point and so on and when we go so we do have to make a walk we've got to create our own end point one of the things that I found that really resonated with people is that there was a study that showed that a panic attack for instance which is how a lot of people experience anxiety only ever lasts 20 to 30 minutes now if you know this right just learning it reading it in my book you can actually maybe not the first or the second time but the third time you have a panic attack and berate yourself and go on that spiral you can actually say yourself hang on this is only gonna last twenty or thirty minutes I can sit through this I'm sure I can be resilient enough to last 20 to 30 minutes of agony if I know that I'll come out the other end and we'll be all cool so one of those selves that I mention in the book is to read and learn and have new conversations if we stay in this notion of anxiety being a disorder and that's the end of the story we're going to stay anxious about being anxious about at the end angels looking for pills outward fixes which as you know from my book is part of the anxious conditioned searching outwards when the south is about coming inwards doing the work to come in words our culture sends us out ricocheting outwards to pills self-help books new gurus next Nix Nix right that's anxious about being anxious about being anxious you go and look for more more MORE it's wrong way go back we've got to kind of come back in and so it is practice it's about reading having different conversations it's about also shear years on the planet and I really like Stanford address that Steve Jobs got gave and I'm sure you sure you know it where he talked about how you get old enough where you can look back and join the dots and you realize that all the things that made no sense at the time they all link up and they create a story I mean he went in setting out in a typography class in the early nineties or late 80s made no sense at the time well we all know it was kind of crucial right so for me this is what I often say to young people is just trust it's going to lead somewhere and so sometimes that notion of be able to sit and reframe things even in the wildest of anxiety spirals it is about just kind of over the years reminding yourself reading more things feeling what works and going oh that's right and I do think meditation as a discipline as a as a practice for that kind of thing that ability to stop find a space between all the words and all the stuff to regroup refocus and be vigilant is non-negotiable so there's this there's there's maintenance so that you can modulate and then there's stuff that you need to do when you're in the wildest of panics it's a - it's a two pronged approach and that's how I live my life talk to me about meditation that that has been the game changer for me and when I think about the hardest things that I've gone through in my life thankfully they came after I learned how to meditate and whoa when I think about what that could have been like if I didn't know how to add a physiological level break the spiral of anxiety yeah it's not it's not good so you've sort of tongue-in-cheek said that you're a terrible meditator that will resonate with so many Apple one walk people through have you improved and if you haven't why it's still powerful okay so yes a knows my answer to that one have I improve I've been meditating for almost 10 years have I improved now I'm is still a crap meditator however that is the beauty of meditation the crappier you are at meditating the more benefits you get why is that so meditation as we know is a practice there's no end point you know there's no perfection to it what I feel is especially in our contemporary culture the real benefit of meditation and it doesn't matter whether you're meditating on a flame a mantra you know your breath whatever it might be everybody within meditation is is instructed to come back right come back to the breath come back to the mantra and I do a Vedic style and there's a Sanskrit word sukshma which means effortlessly and innocently so you use sukshma to gently come back and I sort of think of us at a child that wanders off and you just gently bring it back and off you thought your thoughts go off you know your crap meditator you're thinking about what you're gonna eat afterwards and what you want to do and how god this feels really great I'm gonna you know I'm gonna write a blog post about it whatever it might be you gently come back now if you're a great meditator okay in your twenty or thirty minutes you might only have to do that a handful of times when you're a crap meditator you are constantly gently coming back gently coming back now within that 20 or 30 minutes it's pretty tedious but what you're doing is you're retraining sign houses in your brain that basically say sukshma sukshma keep coming back keep coming back wandering off come back so you go out and get up and start the rest of your day you have slowly over 10 years reprogrammed your brain to do that in the rest of your life so I don't really care from a crap meditator I care about the impacts for the rest of my life you know what it's doing for me in the rest of the day and the other thing is I've had to do a massive pivot a sort of 180-degree turn in terms of the way that I was approaching life and meditation has been the best wrestling pit you know me versus my ego you know sometimes my ego wins and sometimes the lie big guy wins you know and that is a really important process to go through and to be alive to and if you don't have that as a daily disciplined responsible regime I think would be almost impossible to find a calm spot with your anxiety where you can come to use it and thrive with it but over the years I've got looser with it I've felt that I needed to individualize it so I bring in some somatic theory and I do feel that a lot of healing and shifting can come from your body what's somatic theory well it's to do with your body using different aspects and feelings in your body we hold so much emotion in different parts of our body and this is an area that's quite old but it's having a bit of a revival at the moment now and you mentioned before the flight fight or freeze response and animals often when they've got that really primal fight-or-flight thing going on it gets released because they either run or they tear something to shreds you know and survive and there's a release for that kind of cortisone or adrenal kind of surge which is very very natural and then it all drops off with so much of human anxiety which you know it's kind of generally involved in an office or a relationship sitting on the couch you know we don't have an outlet for it we're not allowed to scream when I'll add the bolt we're not allowed to fight we've got to bottle it up and so animals and and presumably humans you know back in caveman days we had an opportunity and that's why exercise is an amazing sell for anxiety because it is an opportunity to express all of those hormones out get them expressed so you don't do anxiety more than once you get anxious but you don't get anxious about being anxious about the anxious you can break that cycle so exercise is an amazing selves but if we're holding all of that in our body it's been held somewhere and it sounds particularly woowoo but there's quite a bit of science now showing that therapy that can get you to focus on those parts you've got in the pelvic Bowl is where our running mechanism and so much of what we do to defend ourselves pivots from so talk to me about the work so meditation that's obviously a practice that you can keep doing what are some other things that that you call the work that people need to do take responsibility obviously that's going to be part of it yeah but how if somebody's watching this right now and they're they're fighting that fight they're in that struggle but they haven't had that moment of reorienting and now go down the path what do they do another thing to do is walk and again as like meditation there's a lot of science in fact even more science I would say around the benefits of just walking it can be done when you're in the middle of a panic attack when you're in the wilds of it but also as a modulating sort of moderation lifestyle kind of hack what's really interesting is the part of the brain that controls walking is the same part of the brain that controls the flight-or-fight response and walking essentially shuts down the fight-or-flight response it really modulates it so you don't have to go off and do anything fancy you just tie on your shoes and walk out the door and I remember being a teenager before I knew the science behind it before I even understood my own body properly I knew that walking would fix it so I had a post-it note on the back of my door and I would it said just walk and it's just my motto now it's also why I hike I've hiked all my life and when I'm particularly manic I will throw myself at a mountain you know I just go and find you know a six mile hike preferably directly up a hill and I just I just go for it and it gets me it gets me connected it gets me refocused and and I honestly that anxiety will just drip away so walking is again another non-negotiable not eating sugar yeah now I didn't answer that part of the question which was right at the beginning of the interview which is how did I move from the sugar into this it's all interconnected I actually started writing this book when I first got him well I moved I lost everything moved up to a a army shed in the forest in northern New South Wales yes of a hippie commune area as you do and and I started researching all of this and I was writing a column for one of the main newspapers and each week I would do an experiment in wellness and it was this week i dot met the Dalai Lama cried with brené Brown etc etc so one week bereft of a topic I quit sugar and hence that became the name at the blog post the newspaper column the book and the digital business so the two projects were always interconnected however I was on a mission always to try to modulate and find a more beautiful way to manage my life and to live a better life and quitting sugar had an immediate impact on both my Hashimoto's and my bipolar immediate two weeks in two weeks I noticed a discernible difference and so I would say that's a non-negotiable and look now many many years later there was all these science that was happening and gradually they were showing the effects of sugar on mental health and of course mental health and sugar intake has increased at the same rate same as obesity diabetes the whole lot interesting correlation is what the the sugar industry would like to call it so yeah now we see studies that show is a there's a clinic in Switzerland that do rent a trial giving some bipolar patients a tablet and the rest all they did was take sugar out of their diet and the latter group did a hell of a lot better and what they found is there's a connection between uric acid and and bipolar and uric acid is is produced when we eat too much sugar etc so there's a lot of science happening in that area but we also do know that it's not about a chemical imbalance in the brain it's more about gut health crazy it is crazy how much the gut impacts neurotransmitters I heard you talk about serotonin how 80% or more is stored in the gut the first time I heard that I was like is that a typo yeah like it is utterly fascinating to me that and speaking personally six years ago I didn't even know what a microbiome was I didn't know we had one I had no concept of that whatsoever and now realizing that it's like a second brain essentially your your enteric nervous system one there are more neurons from your esophagus to your anus than there are in a cat brain it's insane to think that there are that many neurons just like you have in your brain yeah in that space and then to think that there are more cells in your body that are bacterial viral fungal and there are human cells by a lot yeah and that they can communicate both ways is really that whole notion of cutting the head off from the rest of the body you know sort of since Descartes has dictated the whole way we see mental illness and we're now unifying the two and we're starting to really question some of the science so that whole chemical imbalance science by the way in the last I think two or three years has been completely debunked and guess what guess who came out with that science oh the first drug company to prevent to provide a pill for anxiety which by the way was in nineteen I think the late 70s a year or two before anxiety entered the DSM as a official disorder so these are all the questions we've got to ask sugar as well is as just as controlled by various you know influential groups and you've got to ask the robust questions about that the great thing just to go back to some stuff that people can do is that it's all free it's all free it's a bit hard meditation like meditation is shitty right but you just do it we all learn we're a generation who learnt to clean our teeth twice a day and to wear seatbelts we got over it pretty quickly right there's a generation now their life to get used to not carrying plastic bags you get used to it you know humans are pretty good like that so meditation twice a day you just do it non-negotiable walk one of the best things you can do for your health particularly mental health is to sell your car be pardon our ill an interesting be so that people will walk so that you walk I don't owned a car for many many years I walk everywhere absolutely everywhere and it's a mental health strategy and it forces me to walk so walking not even sugar and eating a whole food diet like and if you want to know another really simple to in terms of wellness just learn to cook you know when you stop eating should be stopped eating processed food which means you've then got to buy real food which means we've then got to cook so just learn to cook stop eating packaged foods it is a silver bullet straight through to kind of stable mental and physical well-being these are not expensive things these are things our grandparents used to do they kind of sound boring and really unsexy because people want the thing with the TM on it right they and they want the person who's got the five the five best hacks for such-and-such but really some of it some of what we need to realize about where we need to head politically spiritually physically is that it might just be a bit more ordinary than we used to and that's a good and beautiful thing which makes sense like when you think about just stripping things down to their essence getting back to first principles what what are the things that are more likely to work it's gonna be physiological what I call physiological hooks so will meditation right is a physiological way to interrupt like the thought patterns and all that but using something that evolutionarily we would have anyway eating whole food whenever you can getting you know things you can trace back where it came from yeah I will say that I am I am so sad that I missed the obvious nests of the first principles of this that what your food ate matters I just you couldn't have convinced me that ten years ago like it just seemed so ridiculous to me and now that seems so patently obvious when you think about the fact that your cells turn over every seven years some much much faster than that you're made of the things that you eat and if you're made of the things that you eat the things that you either the made of the things that it ate so it's like Oh didn't eat how it was how it was formulated in a lab somewhere by a multinational company with you know a vested interesting scene you addicted to their product yeah I mean that's that's the that's the frightening thing and the best thing you can do stick it up the system by cooking your own food and don't buy stuff from packets some of the other hacks that I think people quite like and find helpful he's getting touched and it's the weird one but I getting touched mmm human touch so if you're not in an intimate relationship it can be difficult and his her anecdote I don't know if you remember in the book where I was having a panic spiral I was in a shopping mall there was a running shop nearby and I went in there I don't know what size my feet are and I said it because I knew he would have to pull out one of those middle slidy things you know there's old schools out here and he'd have to measure my foot and he'd have to touch my feet and he'd have to talk to me and that calmed me down I didn't buy the running shoes I think I bought a pair of socks actually but yeah I've had to do things like that or I go and get a cheap Thai massage and then in between I do experiments let's see let's see what happens so when you're anxious everything annoys you noises chewing noises everything seems to just go wrong you sit down the cafe you're really looking forward to it it's a special thing it's through one day off and the bloody tables wobbling you know and then it coffee comes out spills everywhere it's cold and it's just you know life sucks and what I do now is I go for the wobbly table and I sit there with fare conditioning unit dripping on top of me and meditation teaches you that I meditate outside each morning I do exercise every morning that's another tip is have a morning routine the decision marking making part of your brain again is the same part that modulates the flight-or-fight anxious response and so if you have to make too many decisions in a day it will actually trigger anxiety anxiety and when you're anxious you can't make decisions and so the less decisions you've got to make in the morning it frees up that that capacity and prevents you from getting anxious in the rest of the day so ya go to the pain sit in that practice it and when you're meditating sit there with flyers buzzing around you've got a leg cramp you've got an itch sit through it practice the resilience I'm gonna ask you like if you have recommendations for people to become more resilient is it as simple as meditating when your nose itches like crazy and not scratching it's absolutely as simple and powerful as that do you have other ones well go into the Wobblies table at the cafe I think really works I have a little thing in my head that says stay stay so when I'm reading that's caught someone I go and check Instagram I want to get up and just you know see if somebody's emailed me I want to go and ring somebody I've got one page in through one page we can't focus on long reads anymore there's a part of our brain that's really starting to suffer from that and so I will practice reading and I have to read a chapter before I go and check my phone and I put my phone on the other side of the room it's dumb stuff like that but it works because we've got to rewire our brain in different ways so yes there's a whole bunch of resilience like coloured techniques that I practice and I experiment constantly you know I'm a really bad swimmer I spend more energy just trying to stay afloat and that's why I do it I live across the road from the beach and sometimes I go down I go alright well I go there I'll go the the pool there's a pool where I live which is in the oceans ocean water that's a you know Olympic sized pool and that's easier but that's more exciting I see octopus and I see you know stingrays sometimes I'll see 20 stingrays you know and beautiful fish and and so on and sometimes I just want to go there but I'll often choose the hardest thing just to see what happens yeah I think that's incredibly good advice and what I love about what you're saying is that I think a lot of people think that to build their resilience they have to do crazy [ __ ] when reality it's it's pretty simple stuff meditation I think is huge like if you have an itch and not scratching it you'd be surprised what that does cold showers are big not wanting to do it but doing it and staying in the water that the notion of repeating stay that's really strong a lot the gym is big so that I want to stop this hurts my muscles are on fire whatever and you keep going showing yourself that you really can go a lot farther than you think you can yeah which is really really powerful yeah and stop where you are Pema Chodron says that she is it's just a wonderful concept wherever you are is an opportunity to wake up or to practice resilience or to stay longer or whatever it might be wherever you are and I suppose that's how you know and that's ordinary but from the ordinary amazing things can happen and apart from anything else it gets you mindful you know all of these things get you mindful they can seem draconian they can seem kind of a bit rah-rah you know but mostly it's about the the vigilance that you apply while you're doing it it really doesn't matter what you do morning pages you know there's all kinds of things going to the gym as you say cold showers we see these fads coming in and out but they all have the same principle don't they and that is vigilance applying yourself to something that's are just a little bit painful ya know I love that love that where can people find the book well it's pretty much new office we make the best beautiful it's on audible it's in on Apple it's in bookstores around the country and you can also buy it by my website Sarah Wilson comm as well amazing and where should people connect with you if they want to learn more no more say hi well I do a lot of my stuff a lot of my hiking experiences on my Instagram which is well it's underscore Sarah Wilson underscore but if you just put in Sarah Wilson it should be in there with two little happy feet at the end of my name beginning the end of my name that's probably the best spot and then Sarah Wilson calm as well nice what is one change that you would have people make that would have the biggest impact on their health look we've been talking about it a fair bit I would say walking and I would say I'd go one step further I would say hiking in nature okay I think there's a lot to be learned from from going into nature and from what nature can mirror back to us I think we anymore I don't understand that so I think a lot of the lessons that we're seeking about connection and about what life is meant to be about plays out in very still and present and awesome way in nature we are a species that responds incredibly well to awesomeness you know and getting an overwhelming sense of how we are both both small and therefore we can back off a bit but then we're also part of something just infinitely enormous that kind of juxtaposition that gets us fired up that gets us truly connected and motivated and inspired and everywhere is metaphor metaphor for what matters you know it's just reflected right there you know the science on walking is amplified when you do the walking in nature so in Japan they've got a whole kind of wellness program that the government funds have called forest therapy which has taken off here in the States as well South Korea now sends bus loads of their tech addicted children to forest therapy camps and the science on just what these trees can emit and the impact on endorphins and various other kind of hormonal responses in the brain is really substantial now and the other principle behind that is while over you're hiking you're not consuming you're not consuming technology you're not consuming crappy food you're not consuming messages on Billboard's and you're not consuming stuff you don't need in shopping malls and that is a recipe for you know kind of infinite happiness so thank you so much on the show that was absolutely wonderful guys trust me you're gonna want to read the book which is absolutely fantastic everything that she puts out is a lot of fun and I think it is really really useful especially now learning how to take control of your own mental well-being is one of the most powerful things that you could do and somebody that understands how it relates to die and all that just doubles the impact all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care everyone I hope you loved that episode and now I want to take a second to talk to you about our friends at better help better help was a worldwide service featuring licensed and credentialed therapists who are certified by their states forward to provide therapy and counseling you all know that anxiety depression and loneliness are serious pandemics we face as a society today and if you or a loved one have experienced a period of ill mental health you know one of the toughest things to do is seek help when you most need it well we want to make that first step easier than ever with better help members get matched to a counselor in 24 hours or less and receive professional counseling using their computer tablet or mobile device anytime they need it anywhere they are I can't think of anything more important to get right than mental health if you want to enjoy your life you guys have heard countless guests on the show talk about it and I can tell you from personal experience that when your mind isn't functioning right nothing else is right so I hope that you guys give this a shot and to get started all you need to do is click on the description below or visit www.ajustlock.com for [Music] doesn't matter loving your life and prioritizing your mental health is absolutely paramount give this a try click on the description below or visit better help.com /h t alright guys I hope that you'll take advantage of this offer I think it's really extraordinary it is super super important alright until next time my friends be legendary and take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 633,728

Rating: 4.8796449 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Sarah Wilson, Health Theory, Quit Sugar, I Quit Sugar, philanthropist, health, mental health, anxiety, bipolar, ocd, bestselling, author, panic attacks, suicide, meditation, somatic theory, mental disorder, mania, depression, serotonin.

Id: hx4Kr1HJ79E

Length: 50min 35sec (3035 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Thank you for your submission. Here's some quick housekeeping. For in depth explanation of common rules, go to https://www.reddit.com/r/bipolar/wiki/rulesindepth

• No selfies or human family pics, youtube channels, discord links, personal blogs. This also includes requests for research participants and any self-promotion/donation links

• No memes or infographics link posts unless it's Friday

• No "why did my bipolar SO/coworker/ex/parent/staff/boss do this?" type posts. Short answer: No idea. Ask them or talk to a therapist about it.

• Be kind to fellow users. No harassment or abusive language will be tolerated. Report and move on. Engaging just brings everyone down.

• We are not Drs so please don't post asking us if you have BP. You wouldn't ask a cancer support group if you have cancer, so please don't ask us.

• Please report self-harm and suicide threats. Users aren't equipped to intervene.

Most of all be kind to yourself. We have a really great piece of the internet due to users like all of you sharing your struggles and offering support. We're here for each other in ways most people probably wont understand so use it often.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.