World Leading Psychologist: How To Detach From Overthinking & Anxiety: Dr Julie Smith | E122

i can't stop now i can't i can't stop doing this dr julie smith she's a clinical psychologist with more than three million followers how is she dealing with stress pressure burnout overload we're subjected to these kind of ideals we're trying to do everything perfectly and it's impossible those things that that we end up doing habitually are the things that work instantly going to the fridge or grabbing the wine or whatever it is and actually the things that tend to work in the long term are hardest in the moment like sitting with it and feeling it and using skills to get yourself through it i just love that therapy it's great for looking at the patterns and the cycles that people tend to feel stuck in in their relationship and it's incredible how life-changing that can be for people without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diver ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in every month to watch the show in person dr julie smith i had some time to read as much as i could about your story and with a lot of my guests there's often tons of backstory online about their personal lives their upbringing their childhood that didn't seem to be the case with you and i think one of the things that from getting further and further down the road with your story i thought was really wonderful was typically when people are successful and they reach the levels of success that you have in their disciplines we we tend to want to point to some kind of anomalous childhood where something traumatic or um really significant happened that shaped them and made them obsessive or overly dedicated or passionate was that the case for you what was your childhood like tell me yeah so uh no there are there's no um sort of major trauma that that triggered my kind of mission to do any of this or even you know had a few questions recently about you know why i was even interested in psychology and and actually i've always been fascinated by people by humans and i read a lot as a child but actually everything i read was about normal people in normal life situations and sort of development of how people become who they who they are and um that's always fascinated me and and actually i i started studying psychology because i found it really interesting you know just um there was a new a-level available at my school my college and so i thought well that sounds okay that sounds great let's try it and i was just fascinated by it and so i kind of went with that and went to university because everybody else was going and it seemed like that was what you do now and um so psychology felt like you know an interesting thing to do i had no idea really what jobs could be at the end of it i just kept following my interests all the way along and and actually when people ask me advice about your careers and finding your passion and all those things that's the only advice i give people really is you know follow your interest do the thing that that excites you or that inspires you and you don't have to have this you know epiphany moment that transforms your life and makes you passionate about doing what it is you're doing um if you follow interest you're much more likely to end up somewhere um in in a job that that you love having done this podcast for quite some time now it's almost a bit of a psychological i don't know um it's it's almost a bit of a psychological journey with each guest but sometimes it also feels like therapy and i'm starting to learn more and more about humans generally the more and more of them that i get to speak to especially because i'm i tend to be speaking to people that are considered to be anomalies in your experience having understood the nature of the human mind and how we think and how trauma and all of these things in mood and decision making are all intertwined together what have you learned just more broadly and generally about the nature of human beings and how and how we come to be the way that we are i know that's a big question but it's one of the ones that i i actually i'll tell you what i've learned okay because then maybe that'll give you a bit of an indication as to what i'm what i'm referring to here one of the things i thought before i started doing this podcast and speaking to people a lot was i thought we were all just so fundamentally different and i thought that um my job would be to find out all the ways that all these successful people are different but i think over time i've actually learned the opposite like fundamentally humans are quite predictable in terms of how if you poke it like this typically a like x y or z will happen yeah i think there is a sense of predictability isn't there and and and certainly you would go with that in terms of the sort of work that i do and working in therapy there are certain patterns that that can be predicted and that's where you know your models of therapy develop because you can predict that if certain things are happening then it might develop into this pattern and but actually while there is predictability people will always surprise you as well so you know even as i work with people one-to-one in therapy no two people are ever the same and and you can never assume anything um because you know everybody has that unique story and the new unique set of experiences that they've been through and their unique set of coping strategies and how they'll then get through that so um i think predictability to a degree but never assume anything because people yeah people will surprise you and how did uh a clinical therapist like yourself you know what question i'm gonna ask you to find their way onto tick tock you've got millions and millions and millions of followers on there yeah it's not i mean we were saying before we started recording tick tock is typically a place that you assume 16 year old kids to be dancing you don't assume clinical psychologists to be giving mental health advice yeah absolutely and that's where you know you talk about anomalies and stuff i guess i have um felt like i've been sort of swimming against the tide in my um in my chosen career and the area that i work in in that it's usually a very private um quiet kind of career choice you're working with individuals it's confidential you work with one person at a time and and in that sort of area of work actually very few people are even on social media um because you have to protect your your own privacy and confidentiality agreements and that kind of thing so um to even put stuff on social media felt quite scary for me because you know your thought is what my peers going to think is this you know what's this going to cause for me but every time that i had someone else come in for therapy who found the educational aspect of it so helpful i would i would go home and and say to my husband why do people have to pay to come and see people like me to find out that bit of information about how their mind works so they can deal with their anxiety better or so that they can um you know function in their relationship better you know there's some there's a set of kind of knowledge there and skills that are taught to people in therapy but they're not therapy skills their life skills and people can use them every day i use them every day to help me get through everything life throws at me and and i just felt that it was unfair that that knowledge should be kept and hidden away in the therapy room so um you know my husband being the person he has said well go on then do it you know make it available and put something on youtube or something like that and so we did we kind of half-heartedly made a really rubbish youtube video and um and then at that same time he discovered tik tok so he found the yet someone recommended it to him he found it it was full of kind of fun dancing loads of really cool comedy and we were sort of scrolling through it laughing instantly just you know falling down that rabbit hole of scrolling and he said well you know go on uh make something like for 60 seconds see what information you can get into it i said well then no you can't you can't cut it down to that you know small amount of time it'll be impossible um and i'll probably get trolled out of there because no one is talking about that kind of stuff there were young people expressing their distress on there and talking about their mental health from a personal perspective but i couldn't find anyone who was kind of sharing education around it so um reluctantly you know got persuaded and had to go and almost instantly um the response was just overwhelming people were messaging saying they were checking in every day to see what the next video was or you know and there's this real misconception as well that that all my followers on there must be this young group of people and you know a lot of the messages i get from parents and even grandparents who are saying oh this concept you explained was really really useful i'm working through it with my daughter or my grandson and it's really helping thanks so much you know where's the next one coming from so i kind of felt like when we started it was going to be this one-off thing like okay oh you know i should you know practice what i preach and have a go and i assumed that we would kind of delete the delete the account pretend it never happened um two years later here we are kind of three and a half million of us later so yeah i mean it there was no kind of set game plan for it but it just felt like the right thing to do it um to kind of put that information out there and see if people were interested in it um and it turns out people were quite hungry for that kind of information you know people wanted not only to talk about mental health but they wanted some evidence-based sort of quality tips and knowledge that that they knew were coming from a i guess a good place a couple of questions there then so the first one is are you still seeing patients one-on-one yeah so i still have a few i had to stop taking on anyone else new because i was sort of bombarded with requests and you know writing the book and everything has taken up a huge amount of my time so i've kept that really limited um but uh yeah i kind of still i still want to keep that going i'm just i'm in the process of trying to work out how to manage that around doing such public things so yeah that's going to be a real transformation for me because that's one of the things i've i've always sort of contended with when people have asked me if i'd do like one-on-one coaching and stuff my d my kind of default mindset is well if i spend an hour i'd rather make a video that i think can reach millions of people than sit with one person on their own yeah so i was wondering what your relationship was with that one-on-one stuff yeah i mean in some ways i do miss some of the one-to-one stuff that i do or did do and and so that's why i've kind of held on to some of it um because you just cannot be being one-on-one with someone in a room and developing that depth of relationship with someone where that therapy room becomes their sanctuary and you know that's an incredible privilege that kind of work and i love it but there is that there is that sense of okay i could sit in this room and you know work with one person at a time or i could make a video and share this idea with potentially a couple of million people which you know has become a real passion and that i i recognize that it just didn't interest me the numbers and the you know kind of business side of it just didn't really figure for me it was genuinely just the feedback the messages and the emails you know i was going through them and and thought was i can't stop now i can't i can't stop doing this if people are checking in every day to see what the next video is or or asking for specific topics because they're genuinely struggling with something um if i can help in some small way then i really should so in terms of that feedback that you're getting from social media i've come to learn that it's not all great as in i'm not saying the feedback isn't all great but the general like stress and pressure and expectation and constant constant feedback can be detrimental in many ways as well talk to me about your relationship with having millions and millions of people that can message you at any time letting you know whatever they're thinking and how you process that yeah you know it's been really tough for me actually because i i'm naturally a very people following probably wouldn't believe this i bounce around in my videos like anything but um i'm actually very introverted shy person you know my ideal day is kind of at home alone with a book probably and so you know the idea of of being public and and being seen by people was not a comfortable one it's something that i kind of endured for the cause if you sort of mean for the idea of oh this could help someone who's in need um so that's something i've had to work through and and do a lot of kind of practicing what i preach you know being uncomfortable for the sake of something that i value or that i believe in um and and yeah i mean i did a video on the mental filter this kind of thought bias that we all have um and use the example of you know with the kind of comments and and feedback and stuff like that that you can have a hundred positive comments and you will scroll through them to find the one that's not positive even if it's neutral you know or go off a bit negative um because you're built to do that you're built to look for any signs that this is not okay or that it's all going to collapse and everyone's going to hate you and and so actually doing the whole thing has has made me practice what i preach because i have to because it's not an easy situation to be in is that you're vulnerable when you're putting yourself online or you know as much as as i do when you're putting yourself out there um it's a vulnerable place to be and a lot of people look on and think it's easy and um and it's it's really not no i have a newfound respect for everyone who kind of you know is brave enough to do that what you were describing there that scrolling through comments looking for the bad one is something i think we can all relate to because i will get 99.9 like great comments and then it'll be as you say the one that's either that's critical or that feels personal it's if someone's like criticizing something that i've like done i don't really care it's when it's when they are criticizing who i am i think i find it hardest and so i wanted to understand why that was and i started doing some reading and some writing about this topic and understanding the nature if we go back in our like in our history as humans of rejection and what that used to mean when i was a human the idea of being like just like kicked out of my tribe yeah and the threat that that would put me under if i was removed from my tribe in this idea of rejection and really like a lot of rejection this is kind of what i came to came to the conclusion of when someone says something like that it's almost like for me it feels like a a threat of rejection a threat of being expelled from the from the you know from the tribe or whatever um obviously not obviously that is not the truth but deep within me somewhere that desire to fit in and be accepted by the tribe is still there so having millions of people being able to give me feedback and some of them seemingly rejecting me from the tribe or saying that i don't feel or whatever is difficult is that like that's a lot of words but does that make any sense yeah because the feeling comes before the rational thoughts about it so you know your your body has that reaction before you're able to consider that you know this isn't your um your only community or this isn't your family or people that are sort of you're dependent on and that kind of thing so i think the feeling will always be there and it's always difficult isn't it but then you can override that with what comes next so it's all it's not about never having that feeling and and i hate it when people kind of say online you know just to stop caring what everybody thinks and that is impossible because you're built to care what people think of you and and you probably wouldn't function in a society that well if you didn't care what anybody thought of you it's about how you then manage it so when those thoughts come along about you know negative comment it's what do you do next with what comes up so yeah it's really about how you kind of respond to to the thoughts that come up after and is it is it in those moments of rejection is it really like the story we tell ourselves about what that rejection means to us i'm thinking now more broadly about romantic rejection my you know i'm dating someone she says you're dumped like the harm surely isn't in the separation surely for me it's always felt like oh well i got to the point where i realized that it was more steve's subconscious brain is telling himself he's a scumbag and not beautiful and not smart because of this rejection is that really where the harm is done like that self-inflicted self-story yeah so i mean rejection is difficult for everybody isn't it but but certainly if if rejection taps into what we call a kind of core belief so if someone grew up with a core belief around being unlovable for example because maybe their parents were inconsistent in their care for example so they you know and you don't think about these beliefs consciously all the time you know they're not at the forefront of of your thought processes but they will influence how you feel and they'll influence how you behave and the choices that you make so what happens is when we have a core belief that is a sort of damaging one or detrimental one we develop um sort of rules for living around that that help us to keep it at bay so it might be you know if i can just be the perfect um business owner and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect dad then no one will reject me and and everything will be okay and so you set yourself these these rules for living that if at some point inevitably you break or there's signs that you're not gonna be able to keep up with them and what that does is when there's signs that you're not gonna keep up with those rules for living you then it kind of triggers that core belief to come to the forefront and that's when you get that rush of kind of psychological distress because it's a distressing thing to believe about yourself and so that's when it can cause people real problems when when that sort of damaging core belief is being triggered on a regular basis for example maybe because it's a turbulent relationship or whatever the situation is um and that's when you can work not only on the present stuff but on the core beliefs and and looking at how those are playing out in relationships and how do you get to the heart of understanding what your core beliefs are because i went through life and i think i got to about 24 years old without being in a relationship and when i asked myself what my core beliefs were as it relates to relationships i realized that they were heavily shaped by watching my parents like toxic relationship and this belief that relationships were prison i because my i thought my dad was in prison for my entire childhood that's what i thought i thought he was trapped in prison because he was in a relationship with my with my mother because they were very um argumentative shall we say so it wasn't until i was 24 and i think because of journaling and writing and really this podcast that i was able to realize that i even thought that and i was having this like avoidant behavioral pattern where the minute i would pursue someone romantically and the minute they would accept my advances i would run for the hills and try and dissuade them out of being in a relationship with me and i had no idea that core belief was in the back of my control center of my mind yeah absolutely and there's there's a really fascinating therapy called cat therapy actually so it's cognitive analytic therapy um just cat for sure but that really is just a fascinating therapy where it looks at the relationships that you have when you're younger so when you're growing up with with parents or siblings or family and in those relationships you learn how to behave in the world right you learn about you know who i am what to expect from other people um and what to expect from the world at large and then you develop kind of survival strategies or coping strategies in for example in in a difficult relationship like that uh you learn how to cope with that and you have these kind of safety behaviors and and as you grow up you're in a different situation right you're not um dependent on parents and stuff like that but those survival strategies all those safety behaviors continue and they get played out in your adult relationships and and i just love that therapy it's great for looking at the patterns and the cycles that people tend to feel stuck in in their relationships and how that reflects those early life experiences that are essentially outdated coping strategies but it's really difficult you know if something's been a lifetime of habit you can't just break that by telling yourself to do that so it takes time and it takes practice and and you literally kind of map out the cycle so that you you learn to sort of acknowledge it in hindsight first of all so you say okay last week that happened and that happened and yeah i went around the cycle and then eventually you've done that enough that you start to recognize it when you're in it so as you're about to do something you think hang on a minute i know what this this is predictable i know what i'm doing and in that moment you then get this chance this is a beauty of kind of awareness is you then get this chance to choose whether you go with it and sometimes you will and you'll go around the cycle again and sometimes you'll do this other thing that you've already worked out you need to do and you break the cycle and and then you get the benefits of that and and so it's this really kind of long process of sometimes going around the cycle again and then sometimes breaking it and finding this new life that you can create in your relationships and stuff like that so and it's incredible how life-changing that can be for people if someone can't afford to go to cat therapy or whatever is there is there a way at home or within their own life that they can sort of achieve the same outcome i think um i don't think it's a replacement for it but i think definitely um things like journaling and and reflecting on experiences and trying to look at patterns of behavior so you know i always find that i don't know when i'm with my boyfriend we argue about this after i do this and then you can literally sort of work it out on paper just writing things down what happened then what happened next then what happened next how did i feel how do i think they felt how did then i feel when they said that and you're really kind of just going through it but keep doing that you know just doing it once won't necessarily open up everything but when you keep doing it you can work out patterns and the themes and and then when you start to get you know and sort of knowledge of that cycle you can then you know begin to look at what's different but sometimes it's really difficult to just know how to break the cycle sometimes that's a really difficult part of therapy for people is working out well where can you break that cycle where where can you exit and do something different and what is that different thing because if you knew right you would just do it so um it's not easy and i think you know maybe it's maybe that's another book to write isn't it it's talking about that relationship stuff because it's so important to people and and you know sometimes having good friendships and and people that you trust to talk through these things with can help to give you that other perspective you know kind of fact checking some of your own because you when you're in it it's so hard to see the wood for the trees isn't it you're kind of it's so much easier once you've got stuff down on paper and you're kind of looking at you've got that bird's eye view and that's really the process of therapy so if you can um recreate any aspects of that with a really trusted friend or loved one then that could be helpful i don't think it's a replacement for therapy and and the model and the training but it's certainly something when you grow a big platform very quickly there's a lot of other sort of i guess psychological things to contend with one of them is imposter syndrome yeah one is one of them is the um the the claim which will be leveled at you i'm sure that you got lucky how do you deal and contend with all of these these thoughts um i'd say lucky's pretty hard work isn't it you probably know that um yeah and and you know there's an element of that i think you know there was probably a timing thing for me in the um you know this huge pandemic started and lots of people at home tapping into new social media platforms they hadn't before um i think it's been uncomfortable all the way along i think because it's been new and i've been it's very public and that's way out of my comfort zone you know i hadn't um i'd been in such a kind of small about i live in a small town i had a small you know one-man band private practice it was just me and the whole reason for that was that i could balance it around my children and be the mum i want to be it was all very kind of organic and and suddenly this this thing started to happen and become a bit of a roller coaster how does it feel to know that the more successful you become at what you do the more public you're going to become to the point where you might be in the daily mail every week and and you know what i've had quite a few moments uh you know i've not even really told anyone this but i've had quite a few moments along the way and where i've really really questioned do i even want this and and i kind of told myself that as soon as that all that feedback nice feedback from genuine people who were saying thank you so much you know what's next i was kind of waiting for that to stop so that i could stop because it's really not been easy you know i've been i've got three small children and it's really really important to me to be present for them so i wanted to keep it as balanced as i could which has been nearly impossible so i was getting up at like five in the morning to make videos for tech talk in the dark before my kids got up and stuff like that and it's not been you know it's not been an easy ride and so it's kind of you know it's been hard work and i think i kept going because i felt like it was temporary i felt like at some point everyone's just going to think yeah this is boring now and and we'll stop um and we would have helped a few people and that would be great i mean maybe you could advise me on that well no i mean because i'm literally going through the same thing which is this realization that i've had more recently especially with the success of the podcast and joining dragon's den that um and then like there was there was a like a really critical piece written about me the other day and it's like totally baseless but it says it basically implies that my last company was like guantanamo bay or something and i was thinking this is this is going to only continue to get more and more and more and i'm going to have to contend with more and more noise as i become more successful at the thing i love doing so what do you what do you do do you stop and i do feel like a sense of mission in cause with what i do as well so do i stop that which feels in some degree a little bit selfish maybe and just focus on like making my life very private i can go to bali and buy a big mansion and just chill yeah or do i carry on doing what i'm doing and realize that an unavoidable consequence of it is i have to log online every day or i have to you know open my emails every day and just see so much noise yeah which which is difficult because as you say i want to have a relationship and i noticed specifically this weekend when i was like speaking to lawyers and doing all this stuff because of this article or whatever that i hadn't spoken to my girlfriend and i'm like the thing that actually matters the most to me the person that provides me with the most like stability and love is the thing as you said the most important thing you say in your book is the thing i'm rejecting in for the sake of noise that doesn't like you know yeah and i think that's where it almost goes against the grain again doesn't it because we're kind of taught to believe somehow there's this undercurrent uh in our culture that that you should strive for you know um riches and and fame and those things because they'll somehow make everything good and and actually they make things harder as well so you know while some people can really enjoy that and they'll really feel that that's where they want to be there's there isn't this narrative where people say it's okay not to because those people are being quiet and going off you know so and doing their own thing so we don't hear that narrative of it's okay not to be extraordinary or it's okay not to stand out from the crowd or it's okay to um to want a quiet life or a private life and and you know i'm as much a victim of that as as anyone else because you know when i'm not wanting certain sort of public things i question myself you know what am i doing am i is this right or and it's often you know about your own values isn't it and how you want to live and and i guess all the time that you're questioning that and reflecting on it and making choices none of them have to be permanent there's this idea that oh if i don't take the opportunity it's all over probably not so you know you can kind of play around with it can't you you could probably have you know six months off to go and hide away somewhere on an island and you could come back and and experience public life again so that you could almost you know work out what is it that i like and want about each one and how can i create a balance for me but yeah we just taught that we need to just strive for extraordinary and and out of the crowd and and i think we have to question that where are you at the moment on this topic in terms of deciding you know how much of you know how much attention and this audience you're building you want to build versus the the privacy and the family and the the things that so clearly much more intrinsically aligned with your values i think i'm i'm guessing there to a sense in the sense that um i need to stick to the reason that i started in the first place i think i have to keep that um sense of integrity about you know i started to be helpful and the thing i loved doing you know the thing i loved about writing the book was researching and learning about psychology and keeping up with the research and that kind of stuff is the stuff i love to do i love to learn about people and then to share that knowledge and so i guess as long as i'm doing that and trying to sort of protect my children at the same time and and and live a normal life then then that'll be okay but all of these things are a balance i don't think there is a clear set answer to any of these things are there you know like you've had that experience with the paper and and that's made you kind of maybe step back a minute and think wow how much do i want this kind of thing and and it doesn't have to you know make you do a 180 but it can make you just acknowledge and learn i don't want to go too far in that direction this is what i want and and i feel like is that with me you're constantly just edging from one sort of position to another and you've got to learn in them you've got to learn from the experience it like on the job right yes these are these are not lessons that i could have learned from someone just telling me yeah and in fact we've probably both grown up in a world where people have warned us about the things we're experiencing and we didn't listen we didn't understand until we felt it right and if you try and convince some ten-year-old kid you probably don't want to be famous you're right okay whatever so you have to learn these things yeah quick one for many years people have been asking for a coffee flavored huel and quite recently he'll release the iced coffee caramel flavor of their um ready-to-drink heels and i've just become hooked on it over the last couple of weeks i've been on a really interesting journey with huel which i've described and talked about a little bit on this podcast i started with the berry ready to drinks then i moved over to the protein salted caramel because it's 100 calories and it gives you all of your essential vitamins and minerals but also gives you the 20 odd grams of protein you need and now i'm balanced between them both i drink mostly the banana flavor ready to drink i've got really into the iced coffee caramel flavor of heels ready to drink and now i'm drinking that as well as the protein make sure you try the new ready to drink flavors that the caramel flavor is amazing the new banana flavor as well as amazing and obviously as i said the iced coffee caramel flavor has been a real smash here so check it out let me know what you think on social media i see all of your tags and instagram posts and tweets about you back to the podcast one of the things you spoke about there is um about values and much of your you know much of what you talk about in your book centers around understanding what our real values are and our goals and what we should be aiming for and how to deal with certain situations your brand new book why has nobody told me this before which i love by the way for many reasons i love it because you don't have to read it all in one sitting you can skip to the key parts that are relevant to you as as is the case with all your content it's super inclusive so it doesn't feel like i mean i've got psychology books on my bookshelf over there that are you know i have to like i have to do one page at a time and like have a massage to get through each paragraph because it's difficult but this is super inclusive whilst also being incredibly um important in its subject matter um so values and goals what is the difference what is the value sure so um the way i would talk about sort of values and goals in therapy is really around a goal is something that you once you achieve it once you get there it's done so you know your goal might be to get through your exams okay exams are over you passed done a value doesn't finish or end it's it's a pathway if you imagine your life as a journey for example it's a path that extends the whole of your life and it's something that you choose to always stay close to when you can and i think you know life will always take you in different directions so sometimes life will pull you away from a particular value but it's really about always evaluating and knowing where that path is so that you can pull back in that direction so for example when your you know your career starts to take over because it's so busy and then you think oh i haven't spoken to my girlfriend all week that's you going that passed too far away now i'm pulling back i need to head back in this direction because this is important to me and and so it's a kind of you know winding path where you you you're you're sometimes you're pulling away from it and sometimes you're going back towards it um and something that i included in the book was these sort of little values check-ins that i would do and and we do in therapy where we look at okay just look at the different areas of your life it doesn't have to be rocket science doesn't have to be really kind of airy fairy it's looking at okay what's important in your life you might have family intimate relationships health creativity you know lifelong learning career contribution those kind of things and then you could literally kind of split it up into boxes and put in each box words not about it's what's really crucial is it's not what happens to you it's not what you want to happen to you it's how you want to respond to things how you want to be in that area of your life what kind of person you want to be so let's say you were looking at your you know romantic relationships what kind of boyfriend do i actually want to be you know what what kind of partner do i want to be what do i want to represent to that person and how do i want to come at difficulties how do i want to sort of respond to problems that we face and and you know that kind of thing so it's all looking at the attitude that you bring to that situation in your life or that area of your life and you might come up with words that that then kind of resonate or you know maybe i don't know and maybe in your work life maybe enthusiasm is a word that you just hold close to you and that becomes one of your values and so um you can then and sort of exercises in the book because you can almost rate okay how important is it to me to be enthusiastic in my work maybe it's ten out of ten that's really really important to me and on that same scale then how much do i feel like i'm living in line with that this week or today um two out of ten i'm pretty tired i can't even bother today this job's really boring today or whatever and then so when you what you've done those you looked you've opened up a discrepancy between okay this is really important to you but you're not living in line with there why what's going on not not in a way that you can then be really self-critical but as a tool to say um yeah my girlfriend's really important to me i haven't seen her for four weeks why what's stopping me from jumping on a plane right now okay let's do that and then you know when you start to do those things and and you're coming back towards your value the the sort of rating for how much you're living in line with it would go up and so doing that kind of exercise is really just a long long-winded way of saying you can look at what's important to you you can just do a really quick measure up of how much am i living in line with it and what areas of my life do i need to pay attention to because i'm not living in line with it so it can be kind of quite simple and a fairly quick exercise really i am i was actually watching a video last night and uh there was a guy on youtube i don't know how i managed to stumble across it the video had like 2 000 views this is not anybody anybody would know but he was sat in his car and i found it really fascinating because i don't know whether i should say this or not but um i found it fascinating because he exhibited certain like narcissistic delusions of grandeur in talking about what he wanted to become and what he wanted from his life and um it got me thinking that it's quite difficult to understand whether something you say or write down or aiming for is a value or if it's just based on like an inherent deep childhood born in security because if you'd asked me at 18 what my values were i would have said a million pounds a lamborghini like i would have i would have defaulted to these things because those were the things that would have like i know scratched my like insecurities right yeah but as i've as i attain those things and had more chance to reflect on what actually makes me feel good and fulfilled and complete i would have said family connection you know health two very different things right one's cause-based one is just an insecurity so how do we know the difference and and you don't right because you know and it's always a horrible answer isn't it but you you know maybe you had that aspiration when you were younger and and you went with it because it's all you knew at the time and then you learnt some you became more wise and your values shifted slightly and and that's the thing that's why i talk about doing sort of quite regular values check-ins because depending on your life you know stage and what you're doing your circumstances your values will change you know my values transformed when i had children and um you know probably sort of flipped them upside down really and and that's okay it was i could never have known that that would be i couldn't have prioritized my children before they were there anyway you know and um and for example you might not have been able to know that you would feel differently now back then at that age you didn't have the capacity to do that you hadn't had the life experience so it's okay you know there isn't this sense of there is this right path and if you get on it at 17 you'll be all right you know the whole process is a learning process so it's okay to change direction it's okay to discover this is not where i want to be but i've learned something here we go let's change direction let's go in this direction and now i've got the knowledge of where i don't want to be speaking of changing direction then a lot of what's written about how we change direction is you've got to make this like big grand decision in your life and then today you've got to go in that direction as if it was like a 90 degree turn and this can be quite terrifying for a lot of people because it's not easy to do you talk about this in the book you talk about habits and things like that and how we make change in our life what have you learned in your you know your experience as a clinical psychologist about how people do actually make meaningful change in direction in their life um i think something i've learned is that big meaningful change is not made drastically and quickly you know sustainable change is made carefully and there's this process of it's not just action there is a lot of kind of reflection and then there's a bit of action then there's a bit more reflection of like we tried that how was it you know do we need to change direction you know we keep moving so it's a kind of bit by bit by bit but we greatly underestimate how powerful and sustainable that can be when we do it bit by bit and and you know develop habits for example and constantly re-evaluate and check in on which direction we want to go in um so i think something that i've learned and certainly actually in my nhs work for example this the type of work that i was doing um it took time you know if someone's really poorly and and there's a lot to work through that takes a long time and that's okay that's kind of how we work it takes time to heal and things like that so um i think i learned to sort of acknowledge that not everything has to be done yesterday um you also talk a lot about in your book about how we can turn bad days into not so bad days i guess um and this relationship which i find really fascinating between the decisions we make our moods and our our like actions and behavior and how they're all like fundamentally linked and i was i was thinking um i remember when i was writing my book having a particular moment where i was in like a bad i was in like not a good mood and i was trying to understand what how to kind of hijack that to get back to a good mood do i go for a run do i just focus on my actions do i have to think my way out of my bad mood what would you say to all of that i think thinking your way of a bad mood is is difficult and and often takes quite a bit of practice around using specific skills and stuff like that um sometimes the quickest way to impact on your mind is through your body so things like exercise music um using your voice like singing and stuff like that things like that can can create quite big shifts in the moment but also human connection so for example you know when you if you've been um you know kind of pent up intense and then or you felt unsafe and then someone hugs you and you burst into tears and it's that kind of shift of of emotion and so you know things like human connection movement music you can utilize those to good effect you know they if they different people are different and so you know one thing will work for one person and something different work for someone else you know i don't know my husband likes to listen to kind of really like old-school new york hip-hop and stuff and that puts him in a great mood it puts me in a terrible mood i hate it so is it kind of you know that everyone has a different um experience of things like music or exercise but if you can understand your own experience what works for you then definitely then utilize those to create even small shifts in the moment because a small shift can just change direction and then other things can help to kind of move it forward what about sleep how important is sleep in in terms of our mood and mindset oh so important so important and you know that's kind of a battle i've been going on because because you know with this kind of work and the demands of of you know creating content um alongside having three small children it's it hasn't been unusual for me to kind of be up in the night with with children and then be getting up at five to make videos before i take them to school and like you know just it's not sustainable that kind of lifestyle and but i notice if i've not had enough sleep um for you know a few days it will impact on how i feel and it'll impact on my performance and how effective i am at work and what i'm doing um and so you know you have it's something you just have to take seriously um i think and something that i don't know in our culture there's this kind of shift towards what's the saying like you you sleep when you die and all that rubbish you know that kind of well you will die sooner if you don't sleep so you know let's weigh this up so it's one of those things it feels like when there's more to be done than can be done um it's so tempting all the time to to ditch on that bit of extra sleep that that you know would be good for you um but it's yeah i think it's something that we all have to just always remind ourselves you gotta you gotta come back to it and you've got to you've got to give your body what it needs do you feel like you've got that balance now i think it's always i think it's always a tight rape isn't it you know like you something will happen and and there'll be a late night or an early morning and that shifts again and there's no recovery because you know children are waking up early and stuff i think while i've got a balance i hate the idea that i might perpetuate this notion that i've got it right and that you know just do what i do because i've got this perfect life and it's absolutely not that way and something that i think is detrimental you know in kind of social media and things like that that can can really catch people out is the idea that you look at someone online and you assume that they have it all sorted and that they don't have problems and they don't struggle with normal human stuff that we all struggle with and and so i've tried to sort of keep that honesty all the way along but yeah these you know i mean these are great tools and they really really help but it doesn't stop life throwing stuff at you it doesn't make you invincible and i say say that in the introduction this isn't the key to a problem-free life it's an arsenal of tools that you can use to face those problems with that will ensure you can kind of get through it talking about all of that so you know the success you've had and the impact it's had on you know your life and having to wake up sometimes that god knows what time to film a tic toc video um one of the things i read about in psychology is this idea that our motivation can start to diminish when something becomes extrinsically motivated so when some when you're paid to do something your motivation to do the task weirdly diminishes even you know even if you enjoyed it before being paid to do so so have you felt that in your life that now that tick tock and making videos has become work the motivation to do it is is shifting at all it can do i think there's the temptation for it to do that isn't there when when things shift um and that's why i think it's been so important to me um to keep in mind i had i think if i didn't have that initial reason for you know i wanted to share this this really good information that's usually locked away in the therapy room i probably it just wasn't me so it wasn't it wasn't enough of a pull you know i didn't have any interest in being kind of public person that kind of thing so it wouldn't have been enough for me to work that hard on it and it's yeah as long as i keep that that thought or that value in my mind about you know sharing knowledge that can help people with their mental health then then that enables me to keep going but has it shifted um what in terms of becoming less motivated yeah or feeling more and more like work no i think there was a period where it felt like just a grind of work when um not the writing i loved the writing but then there was obviously this pressure to keep you know putting content out there and i can't just disappear for six months and um and that pressure felt like but i think that was a symptom of overload of just okay i've got to write a book i've got to be a mom and it's a lockdown and we're homeschooling and i've got to get video on every day and you know that that for me that's a sign of overload and that in turn influences your motivation in the moment but i guess i'm aware that motivation is something i can't rely on anyway it's a feeling and it comes and goes so some days it will feel like a grind and other days it will feel really exciting you know coming to do this and meet you and that you know that stuff's kind of really wonderful and some days you know i'm i'm in my therapy room on my own with the camera going got to say something profound now you know what find something um so you know and i think it's awareness of every job has its ups and downs i can't rely on feeling like it all the time i have to remember why i started it and the values behind it to keep me going what have you so that term overload was interesting because i've never really heard of someone describing it like that um typically people say things like burnout or whatever else what is the um what is i guess the cause and or the cure for people that are feeling overload because i guarantee you like 95 plus of people listening to this now especially in the world we live in will be feeling some sense of relative subjective overload in their lives including me yeah i think we're subjected to these kind of ideals of everything aren't we and you know um for parents there's this kind of um all these images about what it means to be the ideal parent depending on what kind of content you're consuming and then there's these these ideas of the ideal business person or the ideal author or the ideal social media you know whatever and and because we're subjected to so many of them we we then just over extended we're trying to do everything perfectly and it's impossible and then we feel terrible and we feel like we're failing or we're at fault rather than the culture that says you can be anything you want to be you know actually it's okay to decide this is what i want my life to look like and that's okay you know it's just it's okay for it to be like that and and for people to have goals that are smaller than others you know it's um i think it's it probably leads to a much more psychologically healthy outcome i kind of bring that that back to a point that i mentioned earlier and i'm probably just asking this for my own interest but your theoretically you're you're heading in the direction of maybe having 20 30 40 million followers yeah i don't know um and then the demands on your time are going be people are gonna be offering you your own tv show and they're gonna be asking you to write seven books on a seven year on a seven book deal and everyone's gonna want you on loose women and itv's good morning you know all of these it's gonna be constant so how do you how are you going to navigate all of that um i'll probably call you and say stephen what we're going to do advise me um i don't i honestly don't know and and that's the direction of travel you're going in right you're producing more and more content which is going to grow your audience even more your books as smash hit four times number one sunday time's best seller you're going in that direction yeah and i guess um in all honesty my barometer is always my family so my children and i will only ever do um as much as i can do while i'm being the mum i want to be i think and i won't always get that right and i haven't along the way there have been times when i thought no this is too much i need to pull back and um and things like that so i think yeah that's my kind of center point really because that is you know where my core values lie and that's the most important role i have as far as i'm concerned and so i guess i will always use that as as the baseline you know is this going to have a detrimental effect on my family or not um and what can i do within that yeah and that's kind of a values filter i guess yeah in many respects these feelings we have these emotions we have i've always contended with um and i think society has a role to play in telling us how to manage the emotions we feel when we go through life you know on one hand you have this sentiment where it's like kind of just shrug it off ignore it keep going which doesn't seem to be possible with like deep emotions actually seems to be that you're just compartmentalizing it in the background and it's going to erode your brain from subconsciously and the other one is that you know the other narrative we hear is to when you feel strong emotions to really like embrace them and to like but that feels like it can be a bit too consuming that i might not get out of bed in the morning if i really sit and wallow in my emotions so what is the balance of embracing emotions or kind of shrugging them off and ignoring them yeah and actually it's quite sort of complex work when um when you look at sort of what happens in the therapy room um you know there are people who when they experience emotion it's quite unsafe for them because the coping structures that they've had throughout life have been unsafe or dangerous ones and so um you know we'll never kind of advise people to just you know open the floodgates and allow everything in it's very sort of careful and and um there's a process of gearing people up with the tools and i often talk to people about this when when they're thinking about going to something like a trauma therapy right so um while that involves going over the trauma no decent therapist would ever get you to do that without first gearing you up with the tools to be able to cope with the emotion that comes up so um for anyone who feels like they for example kind of shut down emotionally and sort of block it out you want to open up gradually to things and open up gradually to emotions that feel maybe less dangerous or less um sort of overwhelming in small ways in supported ways as well so that you you know you can manage it and it's not going to completely um be overbearing so but i guess on a kind of day-to-day level lots of people don't even recognize that they're blocking they just recognize um that whenever they've done something at work that's embarrassing and they feel awful they just go home and crack open the fridge and they're just looking for anything or maybe it's go on netflix for like six hours and block out the world or gaming or whatever it is and and so often it's hidden in the behavior people will say i'm fine with emotion and but i spoke 50 a day and you know it's a kind of you know what true what's the function of this and that and the other and it's always about looking at it with curiosity not judgment but curiosity why am i doing that what's the function of that what's it doing for me and and often it'll be some level of safety around something that's uncomfortable but it's really key that there's no judgment there because it's something that we all do it's it's human and and that's because our brains are so brilliant at taking over for us and doing something very quickly that we need to make things better to make us comfortable to feel comfortable in some way even if it's some yeah destructive medication or something um on that you know on that point of we have a behavioral response to some stress or emotion we're feeling and maybe not confronting i think i did that a lot when people used to ask me how i dealt with running this big global business 700 employees around the world when times got really tough i mean on the worst days where there was no money in the bank and payday was today those kind of days um i used to i used to i think i used to say on interviews and stuff that i used to come up with all this nonsense about how i dealt with it and how i coped with it but in hindsight one of the things i came to learn was the only times i ever got sick or my skin ever got bad were on like two days after that those really high stress moments so on the surface i was kind of shrugging off and playing it cool but my body as the famous book goes held the score my body would tell me even if my conscious mind wouldn't admit it my body would tell me and then even more recently i've noticed that in certain situations where i'm pretending everything is fine i'll notice maybe my eating habits or my other habits get a little bit more extreme and out of control and i and i always thought i was invincible i always thought i was some tough guy and i think people followed me well i don't know but i think they kind of they saw me as that as being this kind of like you know mentally perfect you know resilient character but even i've noticed that in my behavior and it's been so interesting to just pay attention to it it's sometimes difficult because especially if you do engage in these kind of coping mechanisms shall we say a lot you might find them harder to notice but for me i don't so when i see any shift in my behavior like i remember going through a pattern where i was just i was eating crap again and i thought why am i doing oh yeah because of that thing you've not addressed that's playing on your mind every time you wake up yeah and then my skin tells me straight away i get some like breakout on my skin um men are the worst at this i mean so they say they're the worst at talking about how they feel because the stigmas and stuff yeah certainly i mean about 75 of my followers are female but saying that of the of the male followers that i have they're among some of the most engaged and asked questions and um you know come up with new topics and and respond really positively in comments and things and and so i think there is a shift in the right direction and i think i think social media has had a lot to do with actually it's enabled people to start having a conversation that they wouldn't dream of having face-to-face with people um and certainly i recognized that in when i was just working in my private practice i i wanted to do it around the family so i couldn't do it all so i kind of left the nhs and i thought i would just work in like school hours and i'll manage it around that kind of thing so um i thought i would have to advertise and i never did and that's because well therapy is a really private thing when you're really struggling when it works and you get better and then you're doing fine and it finishes and you go off about your life and then you come across someone who's struggling and they go that really helped me try that and so actually all of my work was based on word of mouth and and i think that's happening more and more that people once they struggle work out a way to get through it and then believe in the in the tools that they learned whatever they were they're willing to share that and and because they don't want to see other people go through the same thing and i think that's a bit of the shift of that stigma um that that people are going oh yeah i went through that or something similar go and try that it really helps and if people are sad at home and there's something that they know they haven't addressed that's playing on their mind that they're thinking about a lot often and trying to just kind of compartmentalize and not what would you say to those people like because you know they might be seeing the the behavioral symptoms of not addressing that thing what would you how do we how do we get it out of the back room and prevent it from causing us behavioral self-harm well i guess you know some people will go to to therapy because they'll have access to that others won't even consider it or have access to it for whatever reason um and i think whatever the situation human contact and human connection is is everything if you can find someone that you trust to talk to and even let's say worst case scenario you don't have anyone you can trust to talk to or you feel so awful about this particular situation you can't bear to talk to anyone write it down just use words use art whatever it is try and get to grips with what what could possibly be going on here start reflecting on experiences not with judgment but just looking at what's happening what happens here what happens before that what what leads up to it that's a lot of what happens in therapy actually is you know people come in with a feeling oh felt this awful thing and then and then we'll look at okay what led up to that let's go back a week and let's work to it and you know what made you vulnerable to that and then equally what came after what did you do did it make things worse did it help a lot of those things that that we end up doing habitually are the things that work instantly and they're addictive because they work instantly right it's going to the fridge or grabbing the wine or whatever it is that they're addictive because they give us instant relief but in the long term they keep us stuck so they're the things that then get us in that cycle of the next time you have that feeling you feel even more need for that that safety behavior or that blocking behavior because it worked so quickly last time and and actually the things that tend to work in the long term are hardest in the moment like sitting with it and feeling it and using skills to get yourself through it so it's not an easy ride depressed know i you the 30-second uh hack the 30-second secret that's what this title is going to be of this video it's going to be the 30-second secret to get yourself out of any bad situation and everyone will click it and they'll realize that there's a lot of new ones um another thing that i get asked all the time and i'm sure you get asked about all the time and something you wrote about in chapter 19 of your book is this topic of confidence it seems to be at the very heart and core of um a lot of issues we do we we have in our lives the lack of confidence but also it seems to be the cause of a lot of good things that happen to us if we have confidence so quite people always ask me when i do q and a's and stuff they say how do you build confidence and there was this really lovely quote in your book that um i really really resonated with that said confidence cannot grow if we are never willing to be without it so when people ask you that question dr julie smith what do you say how do you build your confidence yeah so i did a video on this recently actually where we i don't know what we were thinking but we used kind of balloons with a tube that went between the balloons and i had this idea that um if one of those balloons was confidence and the other one was vulnerability if you're only ever willing to be with your confidence so if you're only ever willing to be in the situations where you feel confident then you're it can't grow it can't it can't sort of grow beyond that let's say um in the pandemic being at home feel you know you're confident at home you feel comfortable at home but being outside you feel vulnerable and so it's really hard to go to the supermarket and it's really hard to go out to a bar with friends now and if you're not willing to be without that confident feeling that you have when you're at home then your confidence can't grow it's not going to grow sitting at home and that's where in therapy we talk about you know the most important stuff is the stuff you do in between sessions in your real life um and so for anyone you know i often say to people if there's something that that you really want to master but it makes you nervous do as much as you possibly can in in manageable doses because the thing that you do every day will become your comfort zone so it will gradually become easier you'll become more confident at your ability to do it but your the way that your brain works is through repetition so the more you do something the more your brain will get better at automating it for you you talk about that same sort of the importance of repetition as it relates to anxiety as well and i guess maybe this is the answer to the question we were asking at the start about how to deal with all of this noise maybe it's just more dealing doing more of it yeah because it's getting used to the feedback and what it means and what it says about us and how to cope with it yeah you kind of you build up coping strategies for it over time don't you the more you do it um it's probably a mix of that and making um clear choices based on your values rather than your feelings about how much of it you want to have how important is it to make decisions not based on how you feel right now um it's okay to do that sometimes right we all do it because we're human but what happens is a lot of people will come to therapy when they've lost touch with their values for some reason maybe life has sort of pulled them in a different direction and they're not totally aware of that they're just aware that everything just feels kind of meaningless or i just feel lost and i'm not sure why i don't feel the way i want to and often when we when we act based on how we want to feel now or how we don't want to feel now that's that short term stuff that will keep us stuck in the long term whereas if you act based on values you can live a life of meaning it won't always be comfortable but it will mean something to you and i bet i guess when you're in the storm of a situation the emotional storm of i don't know you've just found out that you've been cheated on or something's happened and you're you fall into that red you know haze of just rage and jealousy whatever it might be the the question i guess from what you said we should be asking ourselves is like what are my values and how would um how do i behave in line with my deeply held values in this situation irrespective of the fact emotion is telling me to go in yeah run over that person with my car yeah absolutely emotions get such a bad rap don't they because they kind of um you know talk about things like jealousy and people say you know i just could never get jealous because it's an awful emotion or something like that and and actually the emotion isn't the thing to judge the emotion is information it's your brain's best guess at what might be going on around you and your brain sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong and it's your job to work that out and so to look at emotion with curiosity wow i'm feeling really envious what's that about how can i you know how can i work around this and work that out and how do i want to then respond that to that how if i look back on this really difficult moment in a year's time and i feel proud of how i dealt with it how would i need to deal with it to feel that way not easy to do in the moment because these moments happen quite quickly sometimes um and that's okay to make mistakes and then and then move on that's probably a different subject but the emotions get judged but if we can look at emotions with curiosity instead which is a lot of what happens in therapy actually is being able to to notice whatever's in the room sitting with it looking at it with curiosity rather than judgment that's one of the things i've come to learn from doing this podcast is is this idea that we are not our thoughts and in fact we can hold them out in front of us and analyze them for validity but we don't have to like directly associate or identify with all of our thoughts because i think we all go through life believing that the things that are being said in our minds are us saying them and are a reflection of exactly who we are and that's incredibly dangerous especially in high emotional situations right yeah causes people loads of problems when um when we think that the thoughts that pop into our heads say something about who we are or you know that we chose them in some way and and that's where this whole kind of there's a lot of stuff online isn't there about you know only positive vibes and only think positive thoughts and and if you do that you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure because it's not the way the human mind works and thoughts will pop into your head and that's your brain offering up ideas opinions judgments narratives but you know memories all that kind of thing and it's what you do next with it you know and and that's where people can really struggle with intrusive thoughts for example so they'll have a thought that feels bizarre to them or feels um aversive in some way and then judge themselves for having had the thought and try desperately not to have it again and when you try not to have a thought you're already having it because you think don't think about whatever it is and and so you know you're just setting yourself up to fail if you think if you're trying to control what thoughts come into your head but if you allow them all to be there and then you choose consciously what to do with them next or how much time to spend with each one then yeah it's closer to winning this is a two-part question but have you found that people who have lower self-esteem have um a more unhealthy relationship with failure and then my second question to that is how does one go about building their self-esteem is it evidence is it evidence based on self-esteem like even if the evidence is wrong is it based on subjective evidence that we've acquired from our experiences well you know um there's been a lot more controversy around the the idea of self-esteem more recently and the field and and you know self-esteem is based on this idea is your sort of evaluation of yourself and so there was a lot of work done in schools and stuff years ago around getting kids to think of what they were good at and what they could achieve and and their strengths and what they liked about themselves and and you know high self-esteem can be lovely in that sense but it's not always useful depending on what situation you're in so um it's not necessarily useful to think i'm great in a situation where i'm not doing great you have to be honest with yourself and so for me a much more helpful way of looking at it is to to to look at it in terms of self-compassion so your self-esteem can be low but that doesn't mean that you know the story's over and and things are awful for you if you you can have low self-esteem and if you then treat yourself with compassion you're essentially doing what's best for you and like as a young but let's say i had um you know teenage kids and one of them wasn't doing well in school and so didn't want to get up for school in the morning because they felt like they were just you know a failure at school so maybe their self-esteem around school was low if we went with that then we would say okay well let's leave school then let's let's let's have a day off let's let's go with you know um let's indulge this whereas self-compassion or showing compassion to someone in that way would mean okay what's the best thing in this scenario so what's going to be most helpful to you and your future in this is probably working out what's going wrong and getting to school and and tackling the problem right so um so yeah self-esteem can be um a sort of tricky subject really and that people put a lot into it but it's one part of a bigger equation i think i guess it kind of links back to the point about confidence which is is our self-esteem based on a bunch of evidence we've kind of collected from our experiences about the world so i might have low self-esteem as it relates to going on dates because of some childhood rejections whatever and i i took that as evidence that i am unattractive and i've held that's part of my self-story for the last 15 years for example um i used to think as you talk a lot about in your book that as many people do and as a lot of like books have kind of promoted that you could kind of just wake up in the morning and look yourself in the mirror and say i'm a rock star i'm going to be a millionaire you are beautiful you love yourself and you could walk out into your day and just be that person but so clearly and you'll know this from your you know experience many years of helping people that it just doesn't work and i can say that something to someone they can read my quote on instagram and i just absolutely know it's never gonna work because there's some kind of evidence that they've accumulated over their life that is way stronger and opposes nice fluffy words yeah obviously words provide very little evidence for anything other than a prompt i don't know yeah absolutely so your brain works like a scientist with evidence through action so you know if you want to start to feel better about yourself essentially the best way to do that is through action and doing things that not not kind of flood the system and make you feel really vulnerable but something that feels a challenge but manageable and then you get this little kind of step up and there's something else that's a challenge and manageable and you get to step up but yeah certainly with you know words are powerful but um things like affirmations i talk about in the book about how not to completely throw them out but to be sure about how you're using affirmations so if someone already feels lovable and they read an affirmation that says i'm lovable it it'll probably make them feel quite good for a minute and they can soak that in and enjoy that and it'll be kind of short-lived impact if someone has uh doesn't believe that if someone has core beliefs that they're not lovable and they're trying to repeat i am lovable um it can almost be detrimental because it sets up this internal argument where your mind also chips in with the reasons that you're not and then you start kind of battling it out in terms of well but what about this and what about that and then you end up having you know you're in turmoil so it can have a detrimental effect if if that person is genuinely really struggling with low self-esteem or low confidence and that kind of thing so i think affirmations can be more helpful when they're instructional when they're about you know when this do this and it will help you get through this difficult situation like you know sports people use them and stuff like that and help them get through high pressure moments but in terms of turning around core beliefs probably not so much on high pressure moments one thing that i i did recently which i thought was very interesting and got opened my eyes to a whole new world was i did um i did a breath work session okay have you ever done breath work uh not a huge amount of it but um it's getting more popular isn't it yeah and i i just got really intrigued by this idea that breath can have a really profound impact on mood how we're feeling and specifically as you write about it in your book anxiety yeah talk to me about breath and the role it plays and how we can use our breathing to make ourselves feel less anxious sure so it's one of the probably the first things that i will go through with someone because you'll get people um who come along for therapy and that first you know it takes time right you have to get to know each other and that they're trying to communicate their story and then a whole week goes by before you see each other again and actually people often go to therapy when they're in a really bad place and so they'll often be saying is there something i can do in between sessions that's going to help me get through to next week and so if that person is struggling with really high anxiety that one thing that i'll you know is very quick to teach that they can take away is something like a breathing exercise because it's one of the quickest ways that we can um you know slow the anxiety response so if you're anxious your breathing will be fast and shallow so kind of yeah and if you do that for long enough you actually start to feel quite panicky yeah and um and that's because you know your your heart and your lungs are connected so your heart's going to start pounding to get all that oxygen around your body and you'll kind of start gearing up into action so if you can slow your breathing down you can slow the whole process down i think i'd mention this in the book i've certainly done videos on it is um sort of box breathing or square breathing um where you just you can if you're out and about and you don't want anyone to really know what you're doing if you're on a bus or a meeting pick something like a door or a window or something it's kind of box shape and you start with the kind of bottom left corner and as you kind of trace your eyes up to the top corner you're just counting in as you breathe in and it's maybe like four seconds and then as you trace your eyes across the top uh that will be a pause so you're just holding a breath for four seconds and then you come back down with an out breath or four seconds and then hold and so you're just kind of breathing in four hold four out for hold for so and it's just one way of when you're out to give you a visual focus um that can help you to uh just monitor okay and now i'm breathing in now i'm breathing out because when you're really really panicking actually breathing slowly can feel really difficult to do um so you can use that kind of visual but also more recently some great research has been coming out about how to kind of it's helpful to extend the out breath so if you can it doesn't really matter what the numbers are if you can make that out breath longer and more vigorous than your in-breath then that's going to help calm that response fairly quickly why does all of this matter because so my girlfriend started talking to me about breath work and she started studying it and um so i went along kind of reluctantly what is this nonsense to this breath work class and the guy sat me there and started talking to me about the like prehistoric reasons as to why when we're in high stress situations or feeling anxious our breath changes and when someone explains it to me in scientific terms i buy in and the way he explained it to me from like you know if you're on ten thousand years ago and you're in the savannah with africa and the lions running towards you your body prepares you in many ways for that fight or flight response and the problem is in the stimulated stressful world we live in we're kind of like living in fight or flight a lot of the time and i and so after hearing that from him and it's been practicing a little bit i've become really really aware of the fact that when i am stressed my breath basically it feels like it stopped like i it's so shallow and so now i override it and it's been such a revelation in my life to try and override you know because you almost you don't see it you don't know what happens but for me i get the alert which is the feeling of tension in my body and kind of stress and then i can do something about it but where does this you know was he right is that where all this breathing stuff comes from in like meditation well yeah because you can't you know you don't have that kind of anxiety off switch right or you can't directly choose to slow your heart rate but because it's linked to other things that you can influence you have to use those as avenues in to sort of slow the whole process down and and and and that's where you know we we really underestimate things like breath work and and slow breathing because they seem too simple yeah and you know like we want something complex or you know i want to pay for it yeah exactly and then we can kind of believe in it and actually we have the power to do some of these things that make such a difference and that's really where this whole thing grew out of was you know people saying to me in therapy why on earth has nobody told me this before this is not rocket science and it's changing everything and this is brilliant i want to tell everyone i want to you know and and actually there's a lot of the messages i get is people saying i've told my nan i've told my auntie and we're all doing it together thank you so much this is really you know but sometimes they are just really simple things that you then don't forget and you once you've got that tool you've got it then forever you know no one can take that from you that's why i wanted to talk about it a lot is because it's had a big impact on how i feel in those high stress moments and i just wish someone had said that to me earlier that and yeah you're right we're searching for complex solutions to these feelings we have in life over the years from doing this podcast and just general research it's become becoming more and more apparent that really what i need to do is just to live more like a human being and in fact the world i'm living in is doing the opposite of that it's making me live like some kind of cyborg that doesn't have emotions and everything i mean you talk about i think it's chapter five of your book where you talk about the basics and sleep nutrition connection these are all things that exercise these are all things that human beings have always done and in fact the avoidance of those things in the modern world is causing us all of these like symptoms that we're diagnosing as flaws or you know signs that we are broken and i have a chapter in my book which is called just the journey back to human as if like at some point we took a wrong turning and we we actually just need to get back to being humans again and i felt that in your writing but i imagine how do you feel about all of that this idea that we've kind of yeah and what it is to be human yeah because it feels like a it feels like you have to battle to do normal stuff you know to do human things exactly and it's and it is because of i guess the sorts of media that we consume that tell us you know you've got to do more and be more and have more and earn more and spend more and and and it's sort of this treadmill that keeps speeding up and everyone's going why am i so worn out like what's going on and then they blame themselves for feeling worn out when actually it's this environment that and all these kind of pressures that sort of make that worse and so yeah i mean and that's where you know when you ask me about kind of you know what's next and and and how do you cope with all that it always has to come back to uh you know we're in privileged positions right where it can feel like you don't have choice you have to just keep going but actually the thing about privilege is that you then get to choose what's going to be most healthy for me here what's going to be most meaningful and and give me the life that i want to have and and so that you're basing your decisions on on your own values rather than somebody else's it's very true and i think that's maybe one of the real the thoughts that is quite liberating from the potential stress of the situation which is it is always a choice and you have so much you'd rather probably rather have the choice yeah right because else you'd probably still be striving to to get to a position of privilege and choice um yeah because there are people that don't have choice right and that's where something else about in the structure in the book is about how people talk about just eliminate your stress and yeah okay you know say that to the single mom who works 40 hours a week to keep a roof over a kid's head or you know that lots of stresses can't be chosen or you know maybe you're waiting for uh results from the doctor about some tests you had and the stress is just hanging over you know those sorts of stresses you don't choose those they're a normal part of life and there are tools to kind of deal with those um but when there is you know there will be certain parts of life where we can say yes or no and that's when we need to exercise that control i think death that was a big turning point it's not a transition but you talk about death in your book and it's funny because i sat here with my previous guest and he talked about um the importance of accepting your own kind of mortality and the change that can have on you what is your what is your position on this topic do you think it's important to understand that you're going to die and if so why yeah and it's something i kind of got i you know um up to my neck and when i was sort of researching for the book and stuff like that because i included a chapter on grief and and loss and and then i started to um kind of read more widely about you know dealing with your own impending death and and you know for people who have um sort of illnesses and things like that when they know that death is coming and so i just got really kind of into all that stuff and there's some great work out there by some brilliant people around you know dealing with the idea that it's all going to end and the idea that that can be a source of meaning it is a source of fear right everybody has to deal with that fear um but it can also be a source of uh of meaning in life today so it can be a reason why you get up and you go with that value of enthusiasm today or it can be a source of uh you know that's why i get up and i practice gratitude or why i always tell my girlfriend i love her every day or whatever it is that it can can also be a way to live well there's a book called influence which and one of the five principles of influence is this idea of scarcity it's really a marketing book it tells you how to make people believe things have more value and one of the ideas in it is that you make you convince them that it's scarce which is why if you go on booking.com it'll say one hotel room left 75 people just looked at this hotel they're about to book it quick and um that convinces people that the thing is of more value and i think for me death does that i actually have a sand timer over there on that next to that little white head for that very reason and i talk about it in my book a lot because i do believe that most of us don't go through life actually believing or realizing that things are finite and once we do we realize that they're scarce then we will attribute more value to them which means that every moment is so unbelievably more precious and that can help you filter out you know the decisions you're making there's so much there's so many studies been done when they interviewed people on their death beds and asked them about what really mattered and i want to get to the point every single day where i'm making my decisions from the lens of death bed regret if that makes sense i think that will probably keep me more in line with that those values you talk about yeah absolutely and actually um it's an exercise that's done in acceptance and commitment therapy where um you talk to people about um let's say you know you reach the ripe old age of 104 and you're sat in your arm chair and you're looking back on the chapter of your life that is to come what would it need to include for you to be looking back smiling and feeling like yeah did it right there that was that was how i wanted it to go so not necessarily what you would want to happen to you but again it's how you would want to live and the attitude that you would want to face life with how would you answer that question me personally if i can if i can touch people's lives with something that's positive in a world where you can you know your life can be touched by so many things that aren't positive while at the same time still being the parent that i want to be and being present in my children's lives and being a positive impact for them um gearing them up for their own adventures then yeah that'll be prickly for them in the book you say when it comes to a happy life relationships beat money fame social class and all the things we're told to put eff into i talked about the neglecting my relationship over the weekend because of some of these things you've described here um so from your from your practice what have you come to to know about the importance of relationships whether romantic or platonic you know i don't think there is a therapy session i've ever conducted without it coming to relationships at some point you know it is the fabric of us isn't it it's what we um it's what we kind of live for in many ways and and that's why i included it in the section around meaningful life because um i mean i i touch on it and it's such a huge subject that you know you could write reams and reams of books on relationships because they feel so complex sometimes don't they right we just we're constantly making mistakes and not getting it right and having to sort of you know reevaluate and shift and and no one again it's one of those things no one gives you a manual for it and yet when it's going right life feels incredible and when they're going wrong everything feels like it's falling apart and so you know i think it's it's an area certainly that i want to move into more and more because i see the value of it and i see how it just makes all the difference for so many people you know human connection is our sort of inbuilt stress resilience mechanism if you like so you've only got if you're feeling something if you're feeling high in stress for example and you have a good quality human connection or contact with someone changes the way that your body deals with that stress i mean that's that's no tablet that's no nothing it's it's um it's how we're built and it's we're supposed to live in groups together and look after each other and and even in our kind of very individualist society where it makes us value other things and pulls us away we have to keep reminding ourselves of what it means to be human being i think although life doesn't give you a manual for how to navigate a relationship social media at least sets an expectation of how a relationship should be specifically a romantic relationship and this causes a lot of problems right so we don't get the manual but we get this expectation yeah perfect all the time right right and you talk about this and you there's a section in your book about the relationship myths which i was reading through and the two that i really wanted to touch on was the first one you've kind of alluded to there which is um love shouldn't be hard and i in my in my current relationship we ended up actually breaking up because we encountered an issue and i don't think the world at my very very naive age of 24 i think at the time told me that relationships had issues i'd only ever seen from social media perfection so i the minute my relationship was good but challenging i thought it was disposable right because social media has made perfect look so normal yeah and the second one is um which i find really interesting and people find this one quite controversial which is this idea that you don't always need to be together me and my girlfriend are very very good like we're very very comfortable with each other to the point that and people will find this a bit shocking if we go away somewhere like we go to another country we will often have separate bedrooms and because she will have her own space where she sets up all of her stuff she likes to meditate and put her crystals out and all of this stuff and i'll have my own room my own bedroom and then we'll sleep in the same bed but we have our own space and also even if we go on holiday for a month we might i might say to a halfway through the holiday babe i'm going to go in that direction for five days i'll see you then i'll see you in five days time and we've got to a point where we're really comfortable with that but i can't think of another relationship i've been in where any of those things would have been greeted with anything but like anger or like what you know what i mean yeah and i think sometimes that that response from people comes out of our insecurity about what's right because nobody sort of talks about these things or they haven't historically and so nobody really knows if the way they're having their relationship is the same as anybody else and and are we getting it right or wrong and and so often there can be these knee-jerk reactions from people about oh that oh that doesn't sound good because that's not what i know to be true and and you know then it becomes you know diversity it becomes sort of um difficult for people to handle them doesn't it if your experience is different am i then am i wrong um and people get really kind of upset about that and this probably is destroying more relationships than we know this expert this social fake expectation of how it should be going for you whereas in fact much of what i read about in your in your book and even this idea of having more words to describe how you feel treating these things in a non-binary way but just like reflecting on how how do i feel not has he ticked the box of sending me roses today but how do i feel yeah this seems to be a much better way to navigate through life yeah yeah absolutely and going with um what you're dealing with at that point rather than the world says we should be having dinner tonight and you should be buying me ten roses um therefore we we're getting this really wrong if it's not happening and um there can be all manner of reasons why that might not be the case at any one point and and that's okay isn't it but yeah it's looking at if i'm not feeling loved is it just about because i've set a standard and i've i've applied some standard to this other person that they're not fulfilling or um or am i feeling unloved generally you know is this one is this the sort of last straw type thing that there's a build up of resentment because i haven't been expressing my needs and then valentine's day feels like the valid time to do that because everybody else gets roses you know it's kind of um it's a difficult one and how in your thought in your work how often do you see that the relationships we have with others are just a reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves yeah i mean huge it can be really difficult when people for example when people become um depressed and and their relationship with themselves becomes very poor and you know they're talking to themselves in a poor way they believe awful things about themselves it can become really difficult for them then to sustain or manage their relationships in a in a positive way um because they don't feel worthy of that relationship for example i don't i don't know so much about you know people say don't love anyone else until you love yourself and stuff like because again it's this kind of standard isn't it of like i've got to be so okay with myself before i'm allowed to have a partner life doesn't work like that we all work on it for years right and there are times when it's really pushed to the brink and you're tested and or you know your relationship with yourself deteriorates because something's happened and um and that's okay to go through that journey and you can go through it with someone else but yeah i mean if you're struggling with you then then it's likely that you're also going to be struggling in your relationship which then has a knock-on effect to you again so it's a sort of a bit of a cycle we go through life you know especially because you're on this you know you're on a you're doing a lot of media at the moment because of your book and you're having to do a lot of interviews and one of my guests one day a really profound question in the diary we'll get all of our guests to write a question in the diary for their next guest and they wrote a really interesting question which i always like to ask guests now and and and ask them to give me the total honesty in the answer which is um are you happy yes some of the time and i would say that because there's this idea that happiness is either there or it's not it's constant like some people have it and some people don't it's a feeling like anything else and sometimes i'm really happy sometimes i'm ecstatic other times i feel really sad or frightened or stressed and that's okay generally i'm i'm happy with the setup of my life and positive things are happening and all of thank god you all of my children are healthy and safe and all of those things so yeah i'm pretty grateful for my lot at the moment but i wouldn't say you know i've found the secret to happiness and then that is a constant and here i go i know life's going to be a roller coaster because it's for everybody and there will be times when i'm knocked back and i don't feel happy and i know that i'll have my own back when that time comes okay the question okay okay i don't think i understand it because they've underlined one of the words so the word that they've underlined i'm gonna emphasize okay what would you do differently if you didn't have to do anything um if i didn't have to do anything i'd probably spend more time at the beach that sounds bizarre but i love being um outdoors with the kids i love being at the beach with them on the coast or in the forest with the dog and i would probably do more of that i think just being outside and and letting the kids be kids with you know hitting trees with sticks and kicking stones and like you know just the fun stuff probably probably a bit more of that what's stopping you doing that now um that they all have to go to school and and we have to go to work and you know they got skills to learn and clubs to attend and you know it's the kind of normal life stuff that you get busy with which is still just as meaningful but i think you know if there was a week off of school and clubs and stuff like that then that's where we'd go to i think thank you thank you for your time your honesty and your brilliance um the book is as i said it's an incredibly important book not least because of its of its uh its basis in you know more than a decade of knowledge and practice but also because it's so inclusive and it's so easy to read and i know it's going to help a ton of people especially people that don't like or intimidated by the prospect like me of sitting down and having to read 700 pages or whatever in one sitting a book that you can nip into and nip out of over time is so so holiday worthy and so like travel worthy which is pretty much where i read all of my books so thank you for writing such a brilliant book thank you for being such a brilliant person and although i know it's challenging at times i would just reiterate to the fact that you are helping many many many more people than you'll ever get to know or meet and i think that's um that's a very important cause that you're serving so thank you thank you so much and thanks for having me it's an absolute privilege to to come and talk with you and i can have a list of my own questions for you that's for another day but thank you thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO

Views: 1,381,049

Keywords: The Diary Of A CEO, podcast, CEO, steven bartlett, Dr Julie smith, Julie smith, cure my anxiety now, cure my anxiety, tiktoks that cure my anxiety, how to cure my anxiety and panic attacks, dr julie smith, dr julie smith anxiety, dr julie smith tiktok, dr julie smith meditation, dr julie smith psychologist, dr julie smith panic attack, dr julie smith depression, dr julie smith breakup, how to deal with rejection, how to, how to get out of a rut, how to stop overthinking

Id: iLlrIi9-NfQ

Length: 96min 10sec (5770 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022