Speaker 1: It's the most common beat in Western pop music. And
Speaker 1: it's also this resonant frequency at which if you just
Speaker 1: let people walk, that's what they will go to. And
Speaker 1: if you get people to tap along to a beat
Speaker 1: in a lab, that's also the beat that they are
Speaker 1: most accurate at.
Speaker 2: Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great
Speaker 2: thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 2: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 2: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 2: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: What if one of the most effective tools for your
Speaker 3: mental health was your body, not as a replacement for
Speaker 3: therapy or medication, but is something with profound power in
Speaker 3: its own right. For me, If I could only choose
Speaker 3: one intervention for my mood, for my mental health, it
Speaker 3: would probably be exercise. And today's guest, Carolyn Williams, helps
Speaker 3: explain why, as a science journalist, she spent years studying
Speaker 3: the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation.
Speaker 3: In this conversation, we'll explore how movement of all kinds, walking, stretching, dancing,
Speaker 3: even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape. I'm Eric Zimmer
Speaker 3: and this is the one you feed. Hi, Caroline, Welcome.
Speaker 4: To the show, Hillo, Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 3: I'm excited to talk to you about your book. It's
Speaker 3: called move How, The New Science of Body Movement and
Speaker 3: Set your Mind Free. And listeners know I am a
Speaker 3: big proponent of moving my body, primarily in order to
Speaker 3: make my mind feel better. So we'll get into all
Speaker 3: that in a little bit, but let's start like we
Speaker 3: always do, with a parable. In the parable, there's a
Speaker 3: grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 3: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 3: a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 3: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 3: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 3: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 3: for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well,
Speaker 3: which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 3: the work that you do.
Speaker 1: I think it's a really fascinating one because not only
Speaker 1: is it true in life, but in science.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a real basis for this.
Speaker 1: Before I got really into movement, my career twenty years
Speaker 1: or so as a science journalist was looking at the
Speaker 1: plasticity of the human brain and how it changes. And
Speaker 1: it really is true that what we do, the way
Speaker 1: we behave, the way we think, gets written into our
Speaker 1: brains in you know, physical connections between neurons and in
Speaker 1: the pathways, and you know, as you sort of walk
Speaker 1: these paths through.
Speaker 4: Your brain, they become more.
Speaker 1: Worn in worn in Yeah, that's the word I'm thinking of, indented,
Speaker 1: but that's not.
Speaker 4: Really the word I mean.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they've become like like pass through long grass,
Speaker 1: they become better traveled. And so, yeah, it's absolutely true
Speaker 1: that if you choose to be positive and to choose
Speaker 1: kindness and compassion. That's been shown many times that that
Speaker 1: can actually change the way your brain works and the
Speaker 1: way you live your lives. So there really is something
Speaker 1: solid behind that, and that's sort of the way I
Speaker 1: like to operate that I guess.
Speaker 4: I guess I'm a bit of a natural skeptic.
Speaker 1: I want to look for the science, look for, you know,
Speaker 1: where the evidence lies, and it absolutely does back that up.
Speaker 4: So I tried to live that way myself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was reflecting earlier today on you know, I
Speaker 3: occasionally just somewhat jokingly say like, well, I'm just a
Speaker 3: bag of chemicals, right, Like, yeah, at the end of
Speaker 3: the day, we've got neurotransmitters, and we've got hormones, and
Speaker 3: we've got electrical connections and synapses, and it's just all
Speaker 3: very physical, you know, it has a very physical element
Speaker 3: to it. It's chemicals, all that sort of stuff, and
Speaker 3: yet those things both control how we feel and then
Speaker 3: also the things that we do can change those chemicals.
Speaker 3: There's just such an interesting interaction between the two that
Speaker 3: you would think like, well, if it's all chemicals, then
Speaker 3: the way to intervene is chemically, but not necessarily and
Speaker 3: your book is a big testament to that that there
Speaker 3: are ways of changing what's happening inside not just our body,
Speaker 3: but our brain through the way we move.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean that's one of the things that got
Speaker 1: me started on this whole thing. I've been so interested
Speaker 1: for many years and what's happening in the brain and
Speaker 1: how to you know, change brain chemistry, how to change
Speaker 1: the way you think and feel focused on the brain,
Speaker 1: and then it sort of became obvious to me that
Speaker 1: thinking of your brain as if it's not attached to
Speaker 1: the rest of.
Speaker 4: You is kind of weird. And of course.
Speaker 1: There's all this pipework that you know, all the blood
Speaker 1: flow packed with hormones and all kinds of other stuff,
Speaker 1: and all the wiring and the electrical activity that's going
Speaker 1: up and down our nerves. That all impacts what happens chemically,
Speaker 1: physically and as a result, emotionally and the way that
Speaker 1: we are able to think. So obviously what happens below
Speaker 1: the neck matters for how we think and feel. And
Speaker 1: going on from that, it became quite obvious that things
Speaker 1: that we do to our bodies can change that chemical
Speaker 1: environment and change the electrical environment and has.
Speaker 4: A knock on effect on everything.
Speaker 1: So in a way it's liberating because you can then
Speaker 1: use your body as an extension to to sort of
Speaker 1: tweak these parameters and change the way that you feel,
Speaker 1: in the way that life feels to you as well
Speaker 1: sort of outlook on the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I always find it funny when people talk about
Speaker 3: like the brain body connection as if they discovered something radical, Like, oh,
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously it's always been connected, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: not quite sure how we got to it's so disconnected.
Speaker 3: I had a strangely I'm taking things off topic here,
Speaker 3: sort of not really. I had an epiphany about a
Speaker 3: week and a half ago. I was doing Loving Kindness
Speaker 3: meditation and it was a guided meditation, and the leader
Speaker 3: of the meditation instructed you to try and notice where
Speaker 3: in your body you're feeling. This thing happened and I
Speaker 3: realized where I was feeling it mostly was my face,
Speaker 3: and I had been discounting the face as part of
Speaker 3: my body for a long time. Every time I was
Speaker 3: told look for where this emotion is in your body.
Speaker 3: If I noticed it in my face, I was like, no,
Speaker 3: that's my head. Where's in my body?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, But I had this moment where I was
Speaker 3: like a dummy. Hey, your face.
Speaker 4: Your face is part of your body.
Speaker 3: Is part of your body. It is an emotional center.
Speaker 3: It's where I happen to feel a lot of things.
Speaker 3: And that's sort of on topic as far as the
Speaker 3: brain body connection.
Speaker 1: No, I mean it's really relevant because a lot of
Speaker 1: people struggle to tune in to where these feelings are.
Speaker 1: So there's this thing called alexithymia where people aren't able
Speaker 1: to put name to their emotions. And if you can't
Speaker 1: do that, then it's really hard to regulate your emotions.
Speaker 1: So things like meditation and you know, checking in with
Speaker 1: your body can be a way of tuning in and
Speaker 1: going okay, so I'm feeling this right now. I wonder
Speaker 1: how I can change what I'm doing with my body
Speaker 1: or you know, with my face which is part of
Speaker 1: my body, and how that can then have a feedback
Speaker 1: that will maybe make me feel differently.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's really really relevant.
Speaker 1: And so that came up quite a lot in my
Speaker 1: research that being able to tune into your body and
Speaker 1: know what it needs, and know what your.
Speaker 4: Entire body, brain mind needs.
Speaker 1: Is a really important skill and because and often if
Speaker 1: we're so sedentary we're so disconnected from our body, we're
Speaker 1: up in our heads all the time, that we don't
Speaker 1: often make that connection. So it's a really important aspect
Speaker 1: of tuning in to your body.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's start with talking a little bit about
Speaker 3: what the brain evolved to do. And I'd also like
Speaker 3: to talk a little bit about what certain people think
Speaker 3: the brain is doing, what its role is. Can we
Speaker 3: talk about those two things real quickly before we move
Speaker 3: into the specifics of movement.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, because this is where it all comes back to.
Speaker 1: So we tend to have this idea that brains are
Speaker 1: there for thinking and you know, working stuff out. But actually,
Speaker 1: if you look way back in our evolutionary history, not
Speaker 1: every organism on the planet has a brain. Even a
Speaker 1: lot of animals don't have brains, and at some point
Speaker 1: evolution had to make a decision whether brains were worth
Speaker 1: investing in or not. And there's this very well known
Speaker 1: neuroscientists called rodelpho Linas from Columbia, and he pointed out
Speaker 1: that there's this creature called the sea squirt. In their
Speaker 1: adult form, they just look like sort of bagpipe stuck
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the ocean, and they suck in
Speaker 1: water through one pipe and they blow it out through
Speaker 1: the other and they don't move. But in the young form,
Speaker 1: in the larval form, they're sort of like tadpoles. They
Speaker 1: swim around the ocean and their job in life is
Speaker 1: to find a place on the ocean to attach and
Speaker 1: live out the rest of their lives. And when they're
Speaker 1: in this juvenile stage, they have sort of a very
Speaker 1: basic brain, and the reason for this is that it
Speaker 1: needs to coordinate its movements away from things that are
Speaker 1: harmful and towards rewards. So it's a basic system what
Speaker 1: will kill me, what will help me pass on my genes,
Speaker 1: And so this basic brain is connected to its basic
Speaker 1: tail and it swims around. When this lava finds the
Speaker 1: perfect spot, it attaches basically by gluing its head to
Speaker 1: a rock, and one of the first things it does
Speaker 1: is reabsorbs its entire nervous system and it never makes
Speaker 1: any decisions again. So Lena said, well, this just goes
Speaker 1: to show what a brain is for. A brain is
Speaker 1: for informing your movements in the world so that it
Speaker 1: can increase your chances of survival by taking you towards
Speaker 1: things that will keep you alive and taking you away
Speaker 1: from things that will kill you. And if you're not
Speaker 1: going to move, then you don't need the brain. And
Speaker 1: you know, they're expensive bits of kit, their high energy,
Speaker 1: they take a lot to run. And so yeah, from
Speaker 1: right early on, brains were there to inform our movements
Speaker 1: in the world. And you can see that everything that's
Speaker 1: been added on later right up to our you know,
Speaker 1: our clever emotions. You know, in fact, emotion comes from
Speaker 1: the words the Latin for.
Speaker 4: To move away from something.
Speaker 1: So emotions inform us about what we need to get
Speaker 1: away from and what we need to get to. So
Speaker 1: everything else that's come since then has been about informing
Speaker 1: our movements in the world, which.
Speaker 4: Is something that you don't often think about. You think, brains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, us, we've got a cracking brain for thinking of
Speaker 1: very clever thoughts. But at the basis of it, our
Speaker 1: brains are there to help us move sensibly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that analogy of the c squirt. It
Speaker 3: explains a lot about the editor of this podcast, Chris
Speaker 3: also and what has happened to him. I think basically
Speaker 3: what you said is once they stop moving, they basically
Speaker 3: just get rid of their brain. They just don't have
Speaker 3: it anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it just gets recycled because the
Speaker 1: energy can be reused for something else. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that the poor editor. I'm sure he's
Speaker 1: a lovely man, very clever enough.
Speaker 3: Let's just say he doesn't move much and he's not
Speaker 3: very smart. I'm just making some connections here.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't like to comment, but it's true that, you know,
Speaker 1: in humans, especially this use it or lose it nature
Speaker 1: of our brains became even more sort of tied together
Speaker 1: in the point of our evolution when we became hunters
Speaker 1: and gatherers, because then, you know, our ancestors could maybe
Speaker 1: sit around in trees munching on fruit and get away
Speaker 1: with it, and they were absolutely fine. When we started
Speaker 1: moving further afield and looking for food, we had to
Speaker 1: evolve to be able to stand on our feet and
Speaker 1: walk long distance and you know, forage far and wide
Speaker 1: and hunt. But we also needed to be able to
Speaker 1: work together to bring down prey because humans are quite
Speaker 1: puny really, you know, we're not very fast, we're not
Speaker 1: very strong. We also needed to be able to communicate,
Speaker 1: to work together to remember the way home. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of cognitive work that goes into being a
Speaker 1: hunt togetherer. And so there's this idea that that once
Speaker 1: we started taking this this way of life, our physiology
Speaker 1: tied together moving around, being active with the health of
Speaker 1: our brain. And that explains why, you know, we've known
Speaker 1: for a long time that physical activity prompts the brain
Speaker 1: to be particularly plastic. It adds more connections, it adds
Speaker 1: more blood flow. You know, everything works better when you've
Speaker 1: been active. And the reason for that is because these
Speaker 1: two things go together. At that point in oary evolution,
Speaker 1: it stopped being optional to move because if we don't
Speaker 1: move as much as our evolutionary history says we should,
Speaker 1: then the brain starts making savings, and over a lifetime
Speaker 1: that can be quite significan. And so you know, there
Speaker 1: is these quite frightening statistics that thirteen percent of Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: cases can be traced to a sedentary lifestyle. So over
Speaker 1: your lifespan, you know, if you're too sedentury, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: can have a real impact on how your brain ages.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Alzheimer's is a topic near and dear to my
Speaker 3: heart and my partner, Jenny's heart. Her mom is deep
Speaker 3: in that disease. Now, so brain health in general is
Speaker 3: better with movement. Lots of studies show that, I want
Speaker 3: to pivot a little bit to mental health now, which
Speaker 3: is similar but slightly different. You say that poor mental
Speaker 3: health might be part of the price we pay for
Speaker 3: a cushy life of sofas and supermarkets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: we are the only creatures on the planet where movement
Speaker 1: is optional. You know, we can get food, we can
Speaker 1: find a mate, we can entertain ourselves, we can do
Speaker 1: everything we like from sitting down and just moving our
Speaker 1: thumbs and fingers a little bit if we want to.
Speaker 1: So we have to seek it out, and you.
Speaker 4: Know, statistics suggests that by and large we don't.
Speaker 1: And also working life nowadays, you know, even for people
Speaker 1: who write about movement for a living, spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time sitting in this.
Speaker 4: Very chair and not moving.
Speaker 1: So we have to seek it out if we're going
Speaker 1: to do it. And obviously there's a real change over
Speaker 1: over the past decades. We move a lot less than
Speaker 1: even sort of our parents' generation. And we have seen
Speaker 1: this catastrophic rise in mental ill health and loneliness and
Speaker 1: all these other sort of things. And clearly there's more
Speaker 1: than one thing going on I'm not saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's you know, a straight line between our sedentary lifestyles
Speaker 1: and mental health. But given that we have got this
Speaker 1: trend and we know that movement, exercise, even just going
Speaker 1: for a walk is really really important and really good
Speaker 1: boost for mental health, as is strength training. That's a
Speaker 1: really really important one that a lot of people neglect.
Speaker 1: Being physically stronger has been shown really really conclusively to
Speaker 1: help with anxiety and depression and just make people feel
Speaker 1: more powerful in the world and able to cope. So
Speaker 1: this is measured psychologists called global self efficacy, and that's
Speaker 1: just basically a way of saying I feel like I
Speaker 1: can handle stuff. And when people have improved their physical
Speaker 1: strength through weight training or body weight training, they do
Speaker 1: feel more capable. So I think there's a real role
Speaker 1: to play in becoming more active in particular ways as
Speaker 1: well that could really improve people's mental health.
Speaker 3: I'm going to jump backwards a little bit. Maybe I
Speaker 3: want to talk a little bit about interoception and what
Speaker 3: it is and how that leads to what certain scientists
Speaker 3: call a global emotional moment, and then link in how
Speaker 3: movement ties into that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so interception is sort of a little known sense
Speaker 1: that we have, and it's the sense of the internal
Speaker 1: state of our body. So rather than thinking of, you know,
Speaker 1: the brain as the master computer that sort of just
Speaker 1: sends messages downstream, interception is about a cross talk between
Speaker 1: the body and brain, So you think of the brain
Speaker 1: more as a sort of facilitator that sort of takes
Speaker 1: all the information that's coming in about you know, what
Speaker 1: hormones are in the blood, whether you're hungry, whether you're thirsty,
Speaker 1: whether you're feeling, whether the fight or flight response is
Speaker 1: kicked in. You know, all these kinds of things that
Speaker 1: are going on, even down to our heartbeat, you know,
Speaker 1: the way that we're digesting our food. All this information
Speaker 1: is being passed back and forth brain and body all
Speaker 1: the time. And what we know is that slight differences
Speaker 1: in the messages that are going from the body, these
Speaker 1: interceptive messages can really affect mental health. And there's this
Speaker 1: whole body of research now that suggests that some people
Speaker 1: are more or less sensitive to their interceptive signals, and
Speaker 1: that can make you more or less susceptible to things
Speaker 1: like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all kinds of mental health issues.
Speaker 1: And it's involved in things like autism and ADHD and
Speaker 1: all these kinds of things. The global emotional moment is
Speaker 1: basically your brain picture, you know, taking in all this information.
Speaker 1: So there's a part of the brank called the insular
Speaker 1: that takes all this information and puts it all together
Speaker 1: and comes up with a sense of how I feel now,
Speaker 1: and the eye bit of it than me. The sense
Speaker 1: of self comes from these bodily signals and pushing them
Speaker 1: all together brings this global emotional moment. And so it
Speaker 1: stands to reason that if you do anything to change
Speaker 1: these messages, then that global emotional moment will change. And
Speaker 1: so I think tweaking the dials is something that could
Speaker 1: really benefit people. As I said earlier, tuning in doing
Speaker 1: something to change the messages, and that will change the
Speaker 1: way you feel in the moment but also in the
Speaker 1: long term. So the strength stuff is really interesting because
Speaker 1: the idea behind why strength might make you feel more
Speaker 1: capable is that you're upgrading these intraceptive signals from your
Speaker 1: muscles and from your bones that are just maybe given
Speaker 1: this unconscious sense that I'm strong. It's fine, you can
Speaker 1: stand down the anxiety because if anything happens, I can
Speaker 1: handle it, and maybe that's what explains the very strong
Speaker 1: link between increased strength and feeling more powerful.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think this is a really important topic, this
Speaker 3: idea of interoception and signals coming from the body, that
Speaker 3: we aggregate them generally, and it creates this global emotional
Speaker 3: moment because I've spent a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 3: do thoughts cause emotions? Do emotions cause thought? And you know,
Speaker 3: it's a big debate a lot in psychology, and I
Speaker 3: think the answer, as near as I can tell, it's
Speaker 3: a bi directional relationship. I almost more and more am
Speaker 3: starting to go are they even different or they co arise?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The thing that first got me really going, wait, I'm
Speaker 3: not sure that thought always causes emotion is because I
Speaker 3: was able to notice very clearly some days I would
Speaker 3: wake up and I would just immediately feel a certain
Speaker 3: way before I'd had any thought, and then it felt
Speaker 3: like every thought got filtered through that feeling. And that's
Speaker 3: what you're describing, that global emotional moment is sort of
Speaker 3: like the weather that's inside our brain. Yeah, and then
Speaker 3: our thoughts can't help but to some degree be influenced
Speaker 3: by that weather.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one way I thought I heard it described what
Speaker 1: I really like is background music. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: the background music to our life. So like when you're
Speaker 1: watching a film. You know, you're watching a horror film
Speaker 1: and you can't quite work out while you're feeling on edge,
Speaker 1: but it's the background movement that's kind of making you nervous.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, by changing these introceptive messages, you can change
Speaker 1: the background music on your life so that rather than
Speaker 1: feeling like oh god, you know, you know, you can
Speaker 1: actually do something that makes everything feel a bit more
Speaker 1: positive and feel a bit more possible. That's what the
Speaker 1: power of movement do in the moment and long term
Speaker 1: that if you can change those messages, then in general
Speaker 1: your background movements, your life will be.
Speaker 4: Better and will be happier, will be more capable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we interviewed, it's been years ago, a woman named
Speaker 3: Michelle Seeger, and she had done some writing on movement
Speaker 3: and how it makes us feel. And she said something,
Speaker 3: I won't get it exactly right, but it's stuck with
Speaker 3: me all these years, all these interviews, which is like,
Speaker 3: if your body doesn't feel good, your brain, your mental state,
Speaker 3: you're going to feel like shit. The flavor of that
Speaker 3: may depend on your particular neurosis and conditioning, but if
Speaker 3: the body is out of whack, it's going to influence it.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what we're saying, and within ter reception,
Speaker 3: what you're saying is when we move, it helps the
Speaker 3: body be in a better place, and thus the messages
Speaker 3: that we're getting in the brain are better. Changing that
Speaker 3: background music to something that is more enjoyable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in sort of ways that you can't even
Speaker 1: put your finger on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So just like you know, when you're feeling down and
Speaker 1: depressed and miserable, sometimes you don't know why, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: but if you can improve the background messages, then you
Speaker 1: can just feel okay, yeah, for reasons that you don't
Speaker 1: have to dwell on. You just be okay and you're
Speaker 1: bumbling along through your life and everything is groovy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot you can do. And I think it
Speaker 1: was not really a surprise to me when I start
Speaker 1: to thinking of movement this way. It was sort of
Speaker 1: a penny dropping, like, well, of course, I never feel
Speaker 1: more like myself than when I'm halfway through a yoga class,
Speaker 1: or you know, on a long walk or or you know,
Speaker 1: kayaking or just doing something active.
Speaker 4: I know who I am.
Speaker 1: I feel good, I know what I'm capable of, and
Speaker 1: everything's great if I'm slumped down not moved. I mean,
Speaker 1: I had to isolate the ten days when I had COVID.
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness. I was the worst version of myself ever.
Speaker 1: I mean, in theory I could have written several books
Speaker 1: in that time, but well not really.
Speaker 4: But you know, I could have done a lot.
Speaker 1: Of work, but I was so miserable. I was so lethargic,
Speaker 1: you know. And I think if anyone who is quite
Speaker 1: active sort of knows this in themselves, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to put the science and the philosophy behind
Speaker 1: it and say, yeah, for me, that means there are
Speaker 1: good reasons to seek it out and to not be
Speaker 1: lazy even though it's comfortable.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This speaks to two of the mantras that I
Speaker 3: use on the show. The most one is depression hates
Speaker 3: a moving target. It has always been true in my case.
Speaker 3: And then the other is sometimes you can't think your
Speaker 3: way into right action. You have to act your way
Speaker 3: into right. Thinking right. And it speaks to the fact
Speaker 3: that the action in this case, we're talking about movement,
Speaker 3: the actual physical movement changes the way we think yeah,
Speaker 3: versus just sitting there trying to feel better and think better.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it just doesn't work.
Speaker 1: So my previous book, Override or My Plastic Brain in
Speaker 1: the US, was all about trying to think, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to do something to my brain to change my
Speaker 1: brains workings do you know, to make me less anxious,
Speaker 1: to make more creative, to you know, to change various things,
Speaker 1: and especially when it came to anxiety. The thing that
Speaker 1: bugged me about it is that most of the treatments
Speaker 1: revolve around thinking your way out of it, thinking I
Speaker 1: feel anxious about this.
Speaker 4: Logically that shouldn't be the case.
Speaker 1: I can tell myself that I don't need to be
Speaker 1: anxious about this, and that's not how it works when
Speaker 1: you're living it. Yes, you can't think your way out
Speaker 1: of it. Of course, there's the issue with things like
Speaker 1: depression that getting moving in the first place, Yes, is
Speaker 1: a problem. And really interesting research that I found was
Speaker 1: one of the first signs that an antidepressant medication is
Speaker 1: starting to work is that people have an increase in
Speaker 1: voluntary movement, so people want to move more, and then
Speaker 1: that starts off the you know, the nice cycle of
Speaker 1: upward movement. Hopefully, But yeah, I think it's absolutely true
Speaker 1: that if you can get over that barrier and get
Speaker 1: yourself moving, then you're.
Speaker 4: You're off and running. And that's been showing time and again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer to how
Speaker 1: to get off the chair in the first place.
Speaker 3: But I know that is a cruel irony of really
Speaker 3: severe depression, is that. Yeah, one of the things that
Speaker 3: might help you a lot is one of the things
Speaker 3: that's very hardest to do, which is, you know why
Speaker 3: really learning to start small can be helpful, Like how
Speaker 3: you know's what's the littlest thing I can do with
Speaker 3: physical activity. Thing I've noticed a lot is that Let's
Speaker 3: say I'm thinking, all right, I need to do a
Speaker 3: forty five minute bike ride, and my brain thinks about that,
Speaker 3: and it thinks about the amount of energy a forty
Speaker 3: five minute bike ride takes. It knows what it takes,
Speaker 3: it's done it. It's like, okay, that's a lot of energy,
Speaker 3: and it compares it to what it feels currently and
Speaker 3: it's like that's not doable. Yeah, which is why the
Speaker 3: strategy of like all right, Eric, just put on your
Speaker 3: bike shoes, get in the other room works. This is
Speaker 3: my own sort of interpretation of what I think is
Speaker 3: happening in my brain. But my brain is going, oh,
Speaker 3: bike shoes, eh, fuck, you know, one unit of energy. Sound,
Speaker 3: You've got one unit of energy. I can do it
Speaker 3: that way until at some juncture the energy starts to
Speaker 3: generate from the workout itself. Yeah, and propels me. So
Speaker 3: that strategy has saved me more times than I can count.
Speaker 1: I've been quite slack on the getting out of bed
Speaker 1: and doing early morning yoga of late, but I was
Speaker 1: regularly getting up at six and going sort of half
Speaker 1: an hour down the road and doing an hour and
Speaker 1: a half of yoga in the morning. And the way
Speaker 1: I managed to do that was when I woke up
Speaker 1: and grown. Getting out of bed is my least favorite
Speaker 1: thing in the world. I used to say to myself,
Speaker 1: tuck and roll.
Speaker 3: I would just.
Speaker 4: Go that's yeah.
Speaker 1: Attack and roll hasn't worked for me that well recently,
Speaker 1: but now I do go out on a lot of
Speaker 1: bike rides with friends, and yeah, having them appear at
Speaker 1: the door and say what are you ready tends to
Speaker 1: spur me into action. So yeah, it's either pressure from
Speaker 1: outside or some sneaky strategy can be the way but
Speaker 1: you know, one of the people I met during the
Speaker 1: research for the book was Marcus Scottney, who's an ultra
Speaker 1: marathon runner who has suffered with depression.
Speaker 4: Is the entire adult life.
Speaker 1: And even he said to me, I just couldn't understand
Speaker 1: how can I push myself to run an ultra marathon
Speaker 1: over several days when my feats of bleeding and I'm
Speaker 1: absolutely exhausted, and yet sometimes I can't get myself out
Speaker 1: of this depression. You know, I've clearly got the strength
Speaker 1: of mind to do that.
Speaker 4: Why can't I do that?
Speaker 1: So even the best movers struggle with it.
Speaker 3: Let's move into talking about some specific types of movement.
Speaker 3: So one of the things I loved about this book
Speaker 3: is you set it up as globally movement is really
Speaker 3: good for us, but then we kind of go through
Speaker 3: different types of movement and some of the specific benefits.
Speaker 3: So let's talk a little bit about walking. What did
Speaker 3: you find most fascinating about the research you did into walking?
Speaker 1: For most people, it's, you know, such an accessible thing
Speaker 1: that most people can do. I was surprised at how
Speaker 1: it's such a.
Speaker 4: Multi use tool.
Speaker 1: So there's the research into creativity, so you know, just
Speaker 1: in a brain focused sense. We know that when activity
Speaker 1: is turned down in the frontal parts of the brain,
Speaker 1: which are a bit behind the forehead, that we tend
Speaker 1: to think less in straight lines. You know, that's a
Speaker 1: part of the brain that kind of keeps us tethered
Speaker 1: and keep pulling us back and says, don't be dark,
Speaker 1: that won't work, and you know, keeps us with the
Speaker 1: obvious options. And we know that, you know, artificially turning
Speaker 1: down activity in that brain region makes you more creative.
Speaker 1: We also know that walking does something very similar to
Speaker 1: this brain region, and so if you go out at
Speaker 1: a sort of a moderate pace where you're not having
Speaker 1: to expend much effort, you're just sort of meandering, and
Speaker 1: that tends to turn down this thinking bit of the
Speaker 1: brain and the brain goes wide and that's been shown
Speaker 1: to increase creativity. So we have this idea, I think
Speaker 1: in modern society that if we need to work and
Speaker 1: come up with something new, we need to sit at
Speaker 1: our desks and bang a head against the desk until
Speaker 1: we come up with a great idea. But I mean
Speaker 1: that's completely not the way we should be doing it.
Speaker 1: And science says, go for a walk and go for
Speaker 1: a wander, and I think we need to sort of
Speaker 1: you know, rebrand working is something that can be done
Speaker 1: on the move. So that's one way of using walking
Speaker 1: that's really really easy, and it sort of spills over
Speaker 1: for about twenty in experiments, like for about twenty minutes
Speaker 1: after you come back for the walk, So kep of
Speaker 1: brainstorming meeting, go out for a wan to come back,
Speaker 1: and you should have better ideas. Another way is that faster,
Speaker 1: more brisk walk. So there was some really intriguing research
Speaker 1: that I came across. Is this great guy called Dick Green,
Speaker 1: who you started off looking at pipeworks in oil fields
Speaker 1: and then turned his attention to pipeworker the human body
Speaker 1: in or the blood vessels, and it's you know, I
Speaker 1: guess it's sort of the same thing, really, And he
Speaker 1: found that we essentially have these pressure sensores on our feet,
Speaker 1: and when we're putting weight on our feet and walking,
Speaker 1: that sort of sets up turbulance in the blood vessels,
Speaker 1: which adds up to a boost of blood to the brain.
Speaker 1: And I guess that's in a way that's not that surprising.
Speaker 1: That's why you feel a bit more alert when you've
Speaker 1: been up on your feet and moving. But he found
Speaker 1: this sweet spot where our footsteps are at one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty steps per minute, and our heart rate is
Speaker 1: also at one hundred and twenty beats per minute, and
Speaker 1: our heart rate and our footsteps synchronize, and this gives
Speaker 1: you the best boost of blood to the brains, I
Speaker 1: think like twenty percent. The even cooler thing about this
Speaker 1: is that one hundred and twenty beats per minute. It's
Speaker 1: the most common beat in Western pop music. And it's
Speaker 1: also sort of this resonant frequency at which if you
Speaker 1: just let people walk, that's what they will go to.
Speaker 1: And if you get people to tap along to a
Speaker 1: beat in a lab, that's also the beat that they
Speaker 1: are most accurate at. So there's something magic about this
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty beats per minute. The good thing
Speaker 1: about it being common in music, you can google any
Speaker 1: of your favorite genre of movement and one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty beats per minute and you can find the music
Speaker 1: that you can step in time to and just get going.
Speaker 1: And it seems to make you know when your heartbeat
Speaker 1: gets into synchrony, that's when you get a boost. So
Speaker 1: you know, he doesn't have firm data that this is
Speaker 1: what happens and your brain works better. But what he
Speaker 1: says is it could really account for this feeling of
Speaker 1: well being we get when we're out and moving briskly.
Speaker 1: So if you want to not necessarily think broad thoughts,
Speaker 1: you want to get out there and after a period
Speaker 1: of sitting and getting lethargic, you want to ge yourself
Speaker 1: up again and get back in the room, then going
Speaker 1: for a very quick stomp is really effective way of
Speaker 1: doing that.
Speaker 3: At one hundred and twenty beats per minute. I love that. Yes,
Speaker 3: there's another idea in that section on walking that says
Speaker 3: our bones are in constant conversation with our brains. What
Speaker 3: does that mean? That's an intriguing statement, I know.
Speaker 1: Because we tend to think of our bones as being
Speaker 1: these sort of dry, dusty sticks that.
Speaker 4: Hold us up and that they don't do very much.
Speaker 1: But in reality, they are a living tissue that's constantly
Speaker 1: being built up if we stress them by putting weight
Speaker 1: on them, or they get broken down if we're not
Speaker 1: putting weight on them, and you know, we start to
Speaker 1: lose bone density. And when we're actually building up bone,
Speaker 1: there is a hormone released from that bone that goes
Speaker 1: into the blood and it doesn't actually have anything to
Speaker 1: do with the bone building process. What it seems to
Speaker 1: do is travel to the brain. It sort of docks
Speaker 1: onto the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which
Speaker 1: is important for memory, and it's been shown in experiments
Speaker 1: to improve memory and just make the brain function better.
Speaker 1: It seems to have an effect on anxiety as well,
Speaker 1: So this is all sort of connected again. So when
Speaker 1: we're putting on our bones, we're strengthening our bones, We're
Speaker 1: making our body more able to move us around away
Speaker 1: from danger towards rewards. It's also giving a boost to
Speaker 1: our brain to learn better and to retain information better.
Speaker 1: To me, that was a really surprising one. But you know,
Speaker 1: you think of hormones, you think of glands, you know,
Speaker 1: you think of you know, all different kinds of things.
Speaker 1: You don't think of your bones as secreting hormones that
Speaker 1: help your brain to work properly. But they absolutely do.
Speaker 1: So this is really interesting research. Them are now looking
Speaker 1: into it in terms of cognitive aging because the bad
Speaker 1: news is that when you get to about middle age,
Speaker 1: the production of this hormone, osteocalcin drops off, and so
Speaker 1: you have to do a lot of weight bearing exercise
Speaker 1: to keep that going, which is, you know, that's something
Speaker 1: that's very important, especially for women in middle age when
Speaker 1: estrogen starts to drop off. It needs to happen anyway,
Speaker 1: but this is another reason to keep your bones healthy
Speaker 1: and to do that weight bearing exercise. Not only would
Speaker 1: you feel better, your brain might work.
Speaker 4: Better as well. So yeah, that was a real surprising
Speaker 4: one for me.
Speaker 3: And by weight bearing exercise in this case, we mean
Speaker 3: walking walking is a weight bearing exercise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean anything that's holding up your own weight
Speaker 1: against gravity and moving Caunter's weight bearing exercise.
Speaker 4: So we don't know yet.
Speaker 1: It's too early in the research to know whether, you know,
Speaker 1: adding ankle weights while you go for a walk, you know,
Speaker 1: gives you know more as deer causin or whatever. So
Speaker 1: any form of weight bearing exercise. We don't know whether
Speaker 1: more is better, but I would probably suspect that more
Speaker 1: is better, but I don't have any data to back
Speaker 1: that up, so don't quote me on it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the worst that can happen? You can
Speaker 1: move better, get stronger, All good things come from that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes me feel like I need to walk more.
Speaker 3: My primary cardio exercise is now this peloton bike, which
Speaker 3: I love and has been great for my amount of
Speaker 3: time I spend doing cardio and a lot of different things.
Speaker 3: But it is not, as you say, a weight bearing
Speaker 3: exercise in the same way. And the other thing about
Speaker 3: it is it's not outdoors.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then you know there's other stuff.
Speaker 1: This isn't in a book, but I have written about
Speaker 1: balance and research. We were working on our balances anohing
Speaker 1: that declines with age, and being on a stationary bike
Speaker 1: is great for cardio, but if you're on an actual bike,
Speaker 1: you're having to fight gravity and you're having to keep
Speaker 1: yourself upright. So being on a stationary bike or a
Speaker 1: treadmill doesn't tax your brain in quite the same way
Speaker 1: as being out in the real world and dodging obstacles
Speaker 1: and having to look over your shoulder.
Speaker 4: And that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, you're right that depressed people walk differently than
Speaker 3: non depressed people, more slowly, hardly moving their arms and
Speaker 3: assuming a slump posture with their eyes to the floor.
Speaker 3: I was really struck by that last part, the eyes
Speaker 3: to the floor thing. I've been doing something the last
Speaker 3: I don't know a month or so. It's called the
Speaker 3: Alexander technique. I don't know if you've ever come across it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know much about it, but I have
Speaker 1: heard of it.
Speaker 3: I don't either still after a month. But part of
Speaker 3: what the Alexander Technique is trying to do is to
Speaker 3: get you to recognize sort of your habitual patterns of use,
Speaker 3: your body being the main one, and undo those by
Speaker 3: sort of letting them go. But one of the things
Speaker 3: that my Alexander Technique instructor has pointed out to me
Speaker 3: is that my natural use is head down slightly looking
Speaker 3: more towards the floor. That's sort of where I naturally
Speaker 3: orient and as I've started to pay closer attention to that,
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, even when walking, I'm kind of a
Speaker 3: little bit of that head down. So I was struck
Speaker 3: by that eyes to the floor piece. You actually talk
Speaker 3: about it also in the section about core exercises also
Speaker 3: that this is another thing. But I was really struck
Speaker 3: by that because, like I said, it was just pointed
Speaker 3: out to me this week that I do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I do it too.
Speaker 1: I catch myself all the time and I have to
Speaker 1: remind myself look up and look out at the world
Speaker 1: and you know, head up posture matters. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: another thing. The sort of the core research is really
Speaker 1: interesting and that the effects of just changing the way again,
Speaker 1: it's the messages that your body's sending about how you feel.
Speaker 1: And you know, we know that slumped posture, you know,
Speaker 1: everything from you know, a defeated panzee will sit and
Speaker 1: slump down and sort of broadcast the message leave me alone.
Speaker 4: I give up.
Speaker 1: That sort of come through to us as well. But
Speaker 1: the benefit of being a human is we can reflect
Speaker 1: on that and we can change it, and then we
Speaker 1: feedback that. You know, the body then tells the brain, okay,
Speaker 1: you're setting up straight. You must be feeling better. And
Speaker 1: there's some really interesting research into what causes that. And
Speaker 1: I don't know whether your listens will probably know about
Speaker 1: Amy Cuddy's power posing research that she got a really
Speaker 1: hard time because she then linked changes in postures changes
Speaker 1: in hormones in the body.
Speaker 4: That hasn't been backed up by other research.
Speaker 1: But the fact of posture affecting the way you feel
Speaker 1: has been backed up many, many, many times. So it
Speaker 1: were just still looking for the you know, the killer
Speaker 1: mechanism that explains exactly, so, I mean, and there's one
Speaker 1: potential one that I go in the book which is
Speaker 1: really interesting to me for the same reasons I was
Speaker 1: talking about, like thinking your way out of stress, because
Speaker 1: there are links that have emerged between like neural links
Speaker 1: literally wiring pathways between the adrenal glands that pump out
Speaker 1: stress hormones and the parts of the brain that control movements.
Speaker 1: So it's like this strip of brain tissue across sort
Speaker 1: of way your headphones go across the top of your head,
Speaker 1: and these wires from the adrenal glands end up in
Speaker 1: the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement of
Speaker 1: the core, so the trunk muscles the ones that keep
Speaker 1: you upright or not upright, And it's really interesting. There's
Speaker 1: something to do with movement. There's something to do with
Speaker 1: this movement of this midsection of your body and the
Speaker 1: posture that you keep. It's linked in with the stress system.
Speaker 1: And so to me, that suggests that rather than having
Speaker 1: to think your way out of a stressful situation, there's
Speaker 1: something you can do with your body. You can strengthen
Speaker 1: that core, you can change your posture, you can take
Speaker 1: control and tell yourself via your body that everything's all
Speaker 1: right and that you can stand down this stress response.
Speaker 1: So to me, I mean, I'm hoping that there's going
Speaker 1: to be more research in this area. You know they're
Speaker 1: working very hard on it, that will show us exactly
Speaker 1: how to do that. But this link, given the we
Speaker 1: know that posture makes you feel better, and these links
Speaker 1: are there, it would suggest quite strongly that having strong
Speaker 1: call a good posture can really effectively change the way
Speaker 1: you feel and how you deal with stress.
Speaker 3: So listener and thinking about that and all the other
Speaker 3: great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
Speaker 3: isolate just one top insider gem that you're taking away,
Speaker 3: what would it be. Remember, little by little, a little
Speaker 3: becomes a lot. Profound change comes as a result of
Speaker 3: tiny actions, not huge efforts. I mentioned earlier that I've
Speaker 3: been thinking about relationships and how to improve the quality
Speaker 3: of them because they're the quartererstone of our well being.
Speaker 3: Thriving connections light up our world, while strained ones can
Speaker 3: dim even the brightest days. Too often we face relationship
Speaker 3: hurdles alone, feeling lost and powerless. But here's the key.
Speaker 3: Building strong relationships isn't just about chance, It's about mastering
Speaker 3: specific learnable skills, and here's a quick exercise as you
Speaker 3: can do to improve your relationships. Established small daily or
Speaker 3: weekly rituals that foster connections, such as shared meals or walks.
Speaker 3: Every small effort to connect with a friend or family
Speaker 3: member can lead to a deeper or more meaningful relationship.
Speaker 3: For example, Chris and I have a weekly ongoing social
Speaker 3: night commitment where one week night every week we get
Speaker 3: together and do something and having it scheduled just keeps
Speaker 3: us connected. So if you found this helpful, this tip
Speaker 3: came from this week's newsletter, and you can sign up
Speaker 3: for free and get more just like it at Goodwolf
Speaker 3: dot me slash Relationships. In that section en Core, you
Speaker 3: talk about that neuropathway, but you also say that it's
Speaker 3: the area of the body where most of our internal
Speaker 3: organs are found, which means it's the point of origin
Speaker 3: for a lot of our interroceptive messages that we were
Speaker 3: talking about earlier, and so that that area being in
Speaker 3: good shape, so to speak, might improve the way we
Speaker 3: feel also in that way because the interiorceptive messages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then there's this also idea that you know
Speaker 1: this area of the body because the organs are there
Speaker 1: so these you know, the messages from the heart and
Speaker 1: the lungs. You know, everything is coming from the stomach,
Speaker 1: everything's coming from this region that maybe this sort of
Speaker 1: is a focal points. So there's one neuroscientist who thinks
Speaker 1: that this is why we have this sense of.
Speaker 4: Being in our bodies and looking out.
Speaker 1: Of it, because these interceptive messages are in our sort
Speaker 1: of core of our body. So there's something special about
Speaker 1: our trunk because that's where we are in some ways.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a really interesting viewpoint. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people think, oh, for me is in
Speaker 1: my head behind my eyes. Actually, maybe a lot of
Speaker 1: me is in my mid section of my body where
Speaker 1: all the important stuff. Well the brain's important too, but
Speaker 1: you know the other important stuff is there's.
Speaker 3: A lot of other important stuff. Yes, yeah, let's hit
Speaker 3: strength training a little bit more. You hit on it
Speaker 3: to some degree, But there have been studies that compa
Speaker 3: different forms of exercise or they show and you write
Speaker 3: about that strength training is faster and more powerful effects
Speaker 3: on self esteem.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So this was one of the things that
Speaker 1: really surprised me because you know, everyone knows cardio makes
Speaker 1: you feel good, gets a blood pumping and doorphins, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. But studies have shown that strength training alone,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether you're doing cardio or other forms of exercise,
Speaker 1: do lift mood. They help you feel more powerful and
Speaker 1: more capable in your life. So and that's one area
Speaker 1: that I think is quite easy to neglect. You know,
Speaker 1: you can go out and go for a run, you
Speaker 1: can go and cycle or swim or whatever, but actually
Speaker 1: focusing on your physical strength is something that's easy to
Speaker 1: miss and it's really important, and especially in young people,
Speaker 1: because there's evidence that young people are less strong than
Speaker 1: they were ten years ago, as are a lot of
Speaker 1: adults as well, and that you know, maybe that's feeding
Speaker 1: into some of the anxiety issues that we're seeing in
Speaker 1: young people, and you know that they're they're feeling really
Speaker 1: under pressure and able to cope. So you know, giving
Speaker 1: them strength at an early age can hopefully give them
Speaker 1: some tools to take forward into their adult life and
Speaker 1: feel confident and feel that they matter and that they've
Speaker 1: got something to offer the world. So it's something that
Speaker 1: we're missing out on and I think we could definitely.
Speaker 4: Do better with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the studies that you reference were a little bit
Speaker 3: staggering depending on how you measure strength. We're talking about
Speaker 3: a twenty to thirty percent decrease in youth since the
Speaker 3: year two thousand. That is not very long ago.
Speaker 4: I know, it's kind of terrifying really. You know, I
Speaker 4: have a twelve year old and.
Speaker 1: I think, ooh, luckily he's a fidget like I am,
Speaker 1: so is always on the move and doing stuff. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's still very easy to go through school
Speaker 1: and come out the other end and feel that physical
Speaker 1: activity and movement is not for you and you're not
Speaker 1: a sporty kid and you're.
Speaker 4: Not very strong, and that's really got to change.
Speaker 1: It's not helpful because those kids then leave and then
Speaker 1: they're not the ones who who seek out movement in adulthood.
Speaker 1: And you know, and you really have to seek it
Speaker 1: out because you haven't got the time anymore like you
Speaker 1: did when you were a kid. So I think we
Speaker 1: need to do better for children in schools. You know,
Speaker 1: we're cutting down on pe time, we're cutting down on
Speaker 1: break time, recess time, and kids aren't playing outside like
Speaker 1: they used to, they're not walking to school like they
Speaker 1: used to. Yeah, there's all kinds of things that they're
Speaker 1: not doing that are playing into this and I think
Speaker 1: really needs to be urgently looked at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as you said, strength training is one of
Speaker 3: the easiest areas to let go. Like I mentioned the
Speaker 3: cardio bike that I have sitting next to me here.
Speaker 3: I just use it a lot and I love it.
Speaker 3: Strength training has proven to be more challenging for me
Speaker 3: to do consistently. What's actually worked for me is I
Speaker 3: found I've really needed a trainer, someone virtually, and luckily
Speaker 3: I'm in a position where I'm able to afford that
Speaker 3: from time to time. But yeah, it is. It's a
Speaker 3: harder thing for me to motivate myself to do and
Speaker 3: to know, like what's the right level, how much should
Speaker 3: I be doing? There's more nuance to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not obvious, is it going for a run,
Speaker 1: you know when you're breathless and you know you can
Speaker 1: go a bit further than you did last time. It's
Speaker 1: a bit tricky, but I mean it doesn't always have
Speaker 1: to be using weights and in a gym or you know,
Speaker 1: doing anything like that. We can build stuff into our lives.
Speaker 1: So I try and make an effort. Now so you
Speaker 1: can't see from the screen, but I'm actually really small
Speaker 1: on four foot eleven, and I'm quite slight. If I'm
Speaker 1: out somewhere and someone say if I'm carrying something and
Speaker 1: someone says, can I help me with that, I always
Speaker 1: say no, No, I'm fine. You know, I make an effort
Speaker 1: to carry things because that's really important that you can
Speaker 1: use what strength you have and keep it going. So
Speaker 1: it can be as simple as choosing to carry your
Speaker 1: shopping home, choosing to lift and carry stuff rather than
Speaker 1: putting it in a shopping trolley. You know, we can
Speaker 1: build these things into our lives and after a while
Speaker 1: they become habits. So that's another way of doing it
Speaker 1: for people who aren't necessarily into getting into licra and
Speaker 1: lifting weights and don't necessari cause a lot of people don't.
Speaker 3: Feel confident that I'm not wearing cra. No, I'm telling you.
Speaker 3: I know Chris on the other hand, Chris is now poss.
Speaker 4: Loving the lira. Well he's halfway there.
Speaker 3: Then he's wearing likra, but he's not. Yeah, he's halfway there,
Speaker 3: but he's not moving really tight like her in this case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it can also be body weight exercise
Speaker 1: as well, because you know, I spend some time with
Speaker 1: the movenat community who are interested in using your body
Speaker 1: in a sort of human animal kind of way. So
Speaker 1: they don't lift weights, they lift boulders. They don't, you know, swim,
Speaker 1: They don't go to a swimming pool.
Speaker 4: They might swim in a river, you know.
Speaker 1: Things like crawling. I spent a morning crawling in a
Speaker 1: park in London. My goodness, I mean I really could
Speaker 1: not move the next day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was quite incredible. So it doesn't necessarily have to
Speaker 1: be that complicated. And even so, the main change that
Speaker 1: I've made to my working life to get more movement
Speaker 1: in is rather than sitting at my desk all day,
Speaker 1: I spend a lot more time sitting on the floor.
Speaker 1: Because the one thing about sitting on the floor you
Speaker 1: have to get up and you know, your leg pressing
Speaker 1: your entire body weight every time you do that. And
Speaker 1: if you're like me and you keep forgetting you've lost
Speaker 1: your pen and it's upstairs, you have to run upstairs
Speaker 1: to get it up, down, updown. And studies of you know,
Speaker 1: people in the blue zones, you may have come across
Speaker 1: the places in the world where people are far more
Speaker 1: likely to live to one hundred than anywhere else. So
Speaker 1: studies of these people, you know, there's lots of factors
Speaker 1: that seem to feed into their long lifespan, but one
Speaker 1: of them is that they have movement as part of
Speaker 1: their everyday life. So these little old ladies in Okinawa
Speaker 1: and Japan, they have low tables and they're constantly hopping
Speaker 1: up and down from these low tables, and you know,
Speaker 1: going out gardening and foraging and bending down and stretching up.
Speaker 1: So sort of building that kind of stuff into your
Speaker 1: life can actually improve your strength. You know, they call
Speaker 1: them movement snacks in Movenat, which I love because it's
Speaker 1: a bit like you know, when you're sitting eating snacks,
Speaker 1: you know they add up in terms of calories with
Speaker 1: that you're really noticing, and you know that can have
Speaker 1: a real physical effect. It's the same for movement snacks.
Speaker 1: They add up over time. You don't notice that you're
Speaker 1: hopping up and down from the floor, but you're still
Speaker 1: your legs, you're still improving your overall strength.
Speaker 4: So it all counts. And the less you're doing in
Speaker 4: the first place.
Speaker 1: The more a small amount will have an impact. So
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be going out and becoming Ronie
Speaker 1: and getting really big, bolding muscles.
Speaker 4: And in fact, that's the other thing about strength training.
Speaker 1: The improvements in mental health and in feeling more confident
Speaker 1: and powerful, they happened before any physical changes were detectable
Speaker 1: in the muscles. So it's not even that you have
Speaker 1: to build more muscle, it's just letting your body know
Speaker 1: that you can do it and that the strength is there,
Speaker 1: and it sort of releases a bit of latent potential
Speaker 1: that you didn't necessarily know you had. So yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't need to get buff, that's not necessary at all.
Speaker 3: All right, dance, let's talk about dance. Of all the
Speaker 3: exercises that we've talked about, probably the least number of
Speaker 3: listeners are doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, very very few people dance. When we get
Speaker 1: to adulthood, we seem to stop dancing, which is a
Speaker 1: real shame and it's a really fundamental part of what
Speaker 1: it means to be human. So no other creatures dance,
Speaker 1: or if they do, they're dancing a different rhythm that
Speaker 1: we can't work out. But they don't dance like we do,
Speaker 1: to the beats, the one hundred and twenty beats per
Speaker 1: minute like we do.
Speaker 4: And there are lots of theories about why.
Speaker 1: That is that humans are dancers, and one of the
Speaker 1: things is that it helps us bond you know, this
Speaker 1: whole point of needing each other and needing to be
Speaker 1: socially bonded. Dance is a way of bringing it together.
Speaker 1: And so the idea behind this is that when we're moving,
Speaker 1: you know, we have these appropriate receptive inputs. So that's
Speaker 1: slightly different to interception. It's the bodily sense of where
Speaker 1: our body is in space without having to look, and
Speaker 1: that's an important thing of knowing who I am and
Speaker 1: where I end and you begin. So when we're moving,
Speaker 1: we have this appropriate sceptive sense of where our body
Speaker 1: is in space. If we're moving in synchrony with somebody else,
Speaker 1: then the information about their body movements coming in through
Speaker 1: our other senses, our brains get confused. They can't really
Speaker 1: separate the two, and so this sort of breaks down
Speaker 1: the barrier between me and you and we start to
Speaker 1: feel more connected. And there's all these intriguing experiments where
Speaker 1: they get people to move in time together, and then
Speaker 1: they get them to do kind of gambling tasks and
Speaker 1: they can either stuff each other's chances of winning, or
Speaker 1: they can cooperate and everyone goes home happier, and people
Speaker 1: are far more likely to cooperate with each other when
Speaker 1: they've moved together first. So there's something about being a human,
Speaker 1: caring about other humans, feeling connected that moving together just
Speaker 1: makes happen naturally. So, yeah, it can be embarrassing to
Speaker 1: dance with other people, but it doesn't have to be danced.
Speaker 4: It could be yoga, it could be tai chi, it
Speaker 4: could be an.
Speaker 1: Aerobics class, you know, it could be all kinds of
Speaker 1: ways moving in synchrony with other people. But it's something
Speaker 1: I think we're missing out on definitely, and you can
Speaker 1: actually get the same effect on your own. So I
Speaker 1: spoke to this scientists called Peter Jinatta who he works
Speaker 1: on the psychology of the groove, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: getting into the groove of music and feeling that you
Speaker 1: can't help but move your body to it. And he
Speaker 1: says that when you're listening to music that's made by
Speaker 1: other humans moving their bodies, that's how the sound is
Speaker 1: getting creative. You're moving along with that. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like an invitation to join in with the band. And
Speaker 1: so you're moving to the movements of other people and
Speaker 1: you can still get this sort of sense that you're
Speaker 1: part of something bigger than yourself. So even dancing alone
Speaker 1: in your kitchen, which I do quite a lot of,
Speaker 1: can help you feel connected to other people in society.
Speaker 1: So that's, to me, is the most important reason to
Speaker 1: sort of get over ourselves and dance a little bit more.
Speaker 3: In this Science of the Groove, he surveyed a wide
Speaker 3: number of people about the groovous song and regardless of
Speaker 3: their musical interests, one song kind of came out head
Speaker 3: and shoulders above the rest. What was it? Let's give
Speaker 3: the listeners a second to guess. You guess, listeners, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess think is the most groovyous song. I'll tell
Speaker 3: you it is not. Groover is in the Heart by Dlight.
Speaker 3: So you can take that one off your list. Even
Speaker 3: though it's pretty groovy.
Speaker 4: It's probably up there are though.
Speaker 3: Yeah it might be all right. Now you can tell us.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, I think everyone who ever heard this will
Speaker 1: get it immediately. It's superstition by Stevie Wonder.
Speaker 4: And the reason why maybe is.
Speaker 1: Because it's got this syncopated beat, so you're not just
Speaker 1: stomping along to the beat, which does do something amazing
Speaker 1: to us if we sort of we feel connected to
Speaker 1: the beat, we feel empowered that we're going along to it,
Speaker 1: and we get this boost of dopamine.
Speaker 4: We feel good.
Speaker 1: But the syncopated beat, it's sort of like a secret rhythm.
Speaker 1: We can decode it and then we can sort of
Speaker 1: roll our hips and move their arms around and then
Speaker 1: you kind of feel groovy.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's an.
Speaker 1: Outdated word, but we're bringing it back for neuroscience. And
Speaker 1: one idea about you know, why this makes us feel
Speaker 1: good is that there are the balance organs of our
Speaker 1: inner ear are connected to the limbic system, which is
Speaker 1: the brains sort of emotional control sensors. So when we're
Speaker 1: sort of dancing, we're sort of almost falling and catching ourselves,
Speaker 1: and the syncobated beat gives us this.
Speaker 4: It's a bit like, you know, in.
Speaker 1: The same way a joke makes us laugh because it
Speaker 1: sets up expectations and it violates it, and it pulls
Speaker 1: out the rug from under our feet and we laugh
Speaker 1: because it's funny. The same sort of thing happens when
Speaker 1: we're trying to follow a syncubated beat. We're almost falling
Speaker 1: over and we catch ourselves and we feel good. And
Speaker 1: so we have this kind of lovely feeling that we
Speaker 1: just feel amazing, and that's why we can't help but
Speaker 1: move our bodies to it.
Speaker 4: So I love that.
Speaker 1: I can't resist superstition that was playing a lot in
Speaker 1: my university years and gets me grooving every time.
Speaker 3: So yeah, dancing is good. I've taken up the occasion
Speaker 3: or just putting on a song. And you might call
Speaker 3: what I'm doing jumping around more than dancing, perhaps my
Speaker 3: old punk rock day is, but hey, you know it
Speaker 3: does work.
Speaker 1: That works the sensitivity of the kind of gravity detectors
Speaker 1: in our ears. They're very sensitive to up and down movement.
Speaker 4: So that's why, you.
Speaker 1: Know, especially when it's loud, there's this thing called the
Speaker 1: rock and roll threshold where when the music is above
Speaker 1: this threshold, I think it's one hundred and twenty decipell.
Speaker 1: I could be remembering it wrong, but anyway, when it's
Speaker 1: loud enough, people start moving. They can't help but Bob
Speaker 1: and you know, even if it's just a stomp of
Speaker 1: the feet and a back to the head, you can't
Speaker 1: help it. And so you know, sort of poe going along.
Speaker 1: It's a sort of dancing that you could do anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world if someone was drumming and you wouldn't
Speaker 1: look dark. It's a kind of you know the toddlers
Speaker 1: do when they first start moving with the beat before
Speaker 1: they realized they're supposed to be embarrassed and they're supposed
Speaker 1: to not do that, you know, stomping around and you know,
Speaker 1: bashing the air with your fists. It makes you feel good,
Speaker 1: so yeah, you can do it by yourself. It's okay,
Speaker 1: and it still works. I actually had the most embarrassing
Speaker 1: experience joining in with a reformed dance group that I
Speaker 1: went to sort of as part of my research, and
Speaker 1: it was pretty embarrassing the whole thing.
Speaker 4: When we were wafting around, you.
Speaker 1: Know, just moving your body wants to and I was like,
Speaker 1: my body doesn't want to move, my body wants to
Speaker 1: go home.
Speaker 4: This is awful.
Speaker 1: But when the beats got going and you know, the
Speaker 1: whole room was just stomping along, it was amazing. And
Speaker 1: by the end of it, I had this sense that
Speaker 1: I wasn't moving my legs in arms, they were moving me.
Speaker 1: I was just along for the ride and it was
Speaker 1: just this amazing feeling. I was on a total high
Speaker 1: for days afterwards. And you know, this was how we
Speaker 1: got out of our minds and just enjoyed being rather
Speaker 1: than thinking.
Speaker 4: Before.
Speaker 1: You know, we invented other ways of getting out of
Speaker 1: our minds and.
Speaker 4: It works and it's free and you can do it and.
Speaker 1: You can still drive home afterwards. So yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a bit of an eye opener for me.
Speaker 3: I have to say, I did a conscious movement freeform
Speaker 3: movement class virtually and.
Speaker 4: Did you keep your camera on?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah we did, and my partner was here with me,
Speaker 3: and yeah, that's a strange experience, you know, like, just
Speaker 3: move in the way your body wants to move like you.
Speaker 3: I was, like, my body wants to hide in a
Speaker 3: chair in the corner the minute you've suggested this, yes exactly.
Speaker 4: Don't know's my body it has no idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, over time I began to unwind a
Speaker 3: little bit and enjoy it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I sort of had a word with myself
Speaker 1: because I was hanging onto the radiator in the corner
Speaker 1: of this sort of drafty village hall and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, seriously, the only way you're going to look
Speaker 1: ridiculous in this situation is to stand there and not
Speaker 1: do anything. These people don't know you. I mean, I
Speaker 1: had a quite a few friends that said, I'll come
Speaker 1: with you.
Speaker 4: That sounds funny.
Speaker 3: I'm like, no, absolutely exactly, on my that's what I
Speaker 3: was saying. My partner here in the house with me
Speaker 3: almost made it worse. You know, it would have been
Speaker 3: easier with a group of strangers. You did another of
Speaker 3: the things that I suspect would be really great, But
Speaker 3: watching it from the outside, it looks painful to even
Speaker 3: be a part of, which is laughter yoga.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it even gives me a nervous laughter just even
Speaker 1: thinking about it. But but I mean, the reason for
Speaker 1: doing laughter yoga is that studies suggest that laughing, a
Speaker 1: proper belly laugh is a better workout for your abs,
Speaker 1: for your core than crunches. So I mean, ideally you
Speaker 1: would have friends that make you absolutely crack up a lot,
Speaker 1: you know, may make your belly sore at the end
Speaker 1: of it. But if not, then laughter yoga is another
Speaker 1: way of going about it.
Speaker 3: But yeah, but you still look skeptical. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: get the sense you're going back.
Speaker 1: No, No, I don't really think that is my thing.
Speaker 1: And luckily I have very funny friends and a funny
Speaker 1: husband and a funny child. And a dog that I
Speaker 1: could either laugh or cry at most of the time
Speaker 1: because he's such a ridiculous to animal.
Speaker 3: But what kind of dog and how I got to ask?
Speaker 3: We've talked about him twice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is a colleague crossed with a New Zealand
Speaker 1: hunter away, which is basically they took Welsh colleagues to
Speaker 1: New Zealand and thought we need a bigger dog that
Speaker 1: can be more demanding. It can run up mountains and
Speaker 1: it can bark at the top of its lungs for
Speaker 1: fourteen hours straight, so he's quite demanding.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know what I do know what I
Speaker 4: was thinking.
Speaker 1: I was thinking I want a dog and I like colleagues,
Speaker 1: and I didn't really read up enough about hunter ways.
Speaker 4: I don't recommend it unless you really want to run
Speaker 4: up and down hills. But he's great.
Speaker 1: He gives you a great character, he gives me moving
Speaker 1: and you know, there's really no option if you've got someone.
Speaker 1: He doesn't do what my previous dog did, which is
Speaker 1: just come and stare at you until you take him
Speaker 1: out for a walk.
Speaker 4: You can ignore a stare.
Speaker 1: He will come and literally bark in your face and
Speaker 1: you go fine, Fine, I'll take you out. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not negotiable for him at all.
Speaker 4: And seeing him.
Speaker 1: You know, I was saying before about you know, if
Speaker 1: other animals dance, maybe we just can't tune into it.
Speaker 1: When he cuts together with the other herding breeze, it's
Speaker 1: like they click in to each other. Right, Okay, you
Speaker 1: go on the inside, a go on the outside, and
Speaker 1: you just run in circles and it's like the form
Speaker 1: of dance and you can see that they just feel
Speaker 1: amazing when they're doing it.
Speaker 4: So maybe we just can't tune in.
Speaker 3: I've had MutS in the past that have a significant
Speaker 3: amount of Collie in them. The hrding instinct is fascinating
Speaker 3: to watch in them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very strange, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I have a Boston Terrier. She's old, but she's
Speaker 3: still active and she does I call it her ball
Speaker 3: or her bone dance. She loves her ball and sometimes
Speaker 3: she loves a bone and basically she just gets on
Speaker 3: her back and rolls like I mean, she doesn't roll,
Speaker 3: She gets on her back in wiggles on top of
Speaker 3: this thing she loves, just over and over and over
Speaker 3: and over again. I mean it looks to all the
Speaker 3: world like she is dancing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we call it doggie break dancing. Yeah, Jango does
Speaker 1: that too. My dog does that too. That's like the
Speaker 1: bit of breakdancing.
Speaker 4: And he usually teams it with a so it's like
Speaker 4: you're singing and dancing when he's doing it. You have
Speaker 4: to be a mad dog person to understand.
Speaker 3: I know, I know, we're gonna have to pivot here
Speaker 3: so that we don't turn this entire show into dogs.
Speaker 3: Stretching is another part of the book, another type of movement,
Speaker 3: so I want to make sure people get all of them.
Speaker 3: We've got walking, strength training, dance, the core, stretching. But
Speaker 3: where we're going to end is breath control. I've been
Speaker 3: very interested in breath work over the last year. We
Speaker 3: had James nestor On who wrote a great book about
Speaker 3: the breath. But you brought up some really great things
Speaker 3: there also, and I wanted to start with meditation, and
Speaker 3: the most common style of meditation probably is to sit
Speaker 3: and just follow your breath, don't control it, just follow
Speaker 3: it and observe it. But you talk about how a
Speaker 3: scientist or two got interested in, Hey, what's happening in
Speaker 3: the benefits of medica? Is it something to do with
Speaker 3: what's being done with the mind or is it something
Speaker 3: to do with what's being done with the breath? Can
Speaker 3: you share a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1: Yes, this was sort of trying to tease apart whether
Speaker 1: it's the act of mentally focusing on the breath that
Speaker 1: gives you these sort of changes in brain function and
Speaker 1: the way that you feel, or whether it's something to
Speaker 1: do with the breathing. And it's really interesting that the
Speaker 1: actual act of breathing through your nose, in and out
Speaker 1: through your nose, what you're basically doing is harnessing your
Speaker 1: brain waves and sort of taking their rhythm under control,
Speaker 1: which sounds completely out there, but it kind of makes
Speaker 1: sense when you think about the way that the brain works.
Speaker 1: And again, it's all about getting information from your environment
Speaker 1: and then using that sensibly to improve your chances of survival. So,
Speaker 1: when you're taking in breath through your nose, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of information about the environment, how safe a rewarding
Speaker 1: it is in that and so this information goes through
Speaker 1: the olfactory cortex, which is sort of the top of
Speaker 1: the nose, and then to make use of that information,
Speaker 1: what you then need to do is to get other
Speaker 1: brain areas, so the bits that are to do with
Speaker 1: memory to make sense of what this information means, and
Speaker 1: then emotional responses.
Speaker 4: You know, does this make me scared, does this make
Speaker 4: me happy? Whatever?
Speaker 1: And for all those different brain regions to talk to
Speaker 1: each other, they need to be on the same brainwave frequency.
Speaker 1: And so as a result of that working of the brain,
Speaker 1: when we breathe in and out through our nose, the
Speaker 1: whole brain starts to synchronize and beat to the same rhythm.
Speaker 1: And when we slow down our breathing that has effects
Speaker 1: of slowing down brainwaves that they propagate through the brain.
Speaker 1: So even as I'm saying this, it sounds so far fetched,
Speaker 1: but this is what studies are showing with EG, which
Speaker 1: is looking at the frequency of brainwaves across the brain
Speaker 1: and so when you really really slow it down. So
Speaker 1: this particular experiment was looking at when you slow your
Speaker 1: breath down to three breaths per minute. So that's really
Speaker 1: quite difficult to keep up. In fact, in the study,
Speaker 1: a few of the volunteers actually fell asleep during the
Speaker 1: study because they were so relaxed it off. But that
Speaker 1: can sort of take you into this altered state of
Speaker 1: consciousness where you are more in a sense of being
Speaker 1: rather than thinking. You know, I'm not big on sitting around.
Speaker 1: This explains why all these expert meditators commit to all
Speaker 1: this sitting around and breathing slowly and can actually do
Speaker 1: this for this long because it takes you to this
Speaker 1: amazing state of just being and being at one of
Speaker 1: the universe. I haven't managed it myself, but it seems
Speaker 1: worth aiming for. To me, I would definitely fall asleep.
Speaker 1: Sleeping is like my thing. I can definitely fall asleep anywhere,
Speaker 1: but at different rates. You know, six breaths per minute
Speaker 1: is a lot easier to do, and that's if you
Speaker 1: get people to breathe at different rates. The one that
Speaker 1: they tend to say that was the most comfortable and
Speaker 1: relaxing is six breaths per minute. And interestingly, in studies
Speaker 1: of things like chanting, reciting the Rosary in Latin, sort
Speaker 1: of these sort of prayer based practices, studies of those
Speaker 1: have found that it tends to naturally make people's breath
Speaker 1: go to six breaths per minute. So it's almost like
Speaker 1: humanity's worked out that this is how you feel good,
Speaker 1: This is how you feel calm and held and looked
Speaker 1: after so breathing its six breaths per.
Speaker 4: Minute has all kinds of benefits.
Speaker 1: It fills your lungs more effectively, it activates the vegus nerve,
Speaker 1: which calms the whole nervous system down. And so it's
Speaker 1: just this very easy. I mean, it doesn't even feature
Speaker 1: when you think about movement, but this is a voluntary
Speaker 1: movement that our species can do and not many others can,
Speaker 1: to sort of override just the in and out of
Speaker 1: oxygen into our bodies and to take control and that
Speaker 1: can change the way that we feel. And it's such
Speaker 1: a simple thing. You don't have to be fit, you
Speaker 1: don't have to be strong, you don't have to be able.
Speaker 1: Anyone can do it. It's a really really important thing
Speaker 1: to do, and we don't know yet how important it
Speaker 1: is or whether it makes any difference if you do
Speaker 1: that breathing whilst moving.
Speaker 4: So I find that.
Speaker 1: When I'm breathing and moving, that's how I get myself
Speaker 1: into that kind of calm state, is by doing yoga
Speaker 1: and focusing on breathing. But it means that there is
Speaker 1: a small amount of evidence that it might be even
Speaker 1: more effective if you're moving and breathing at calm right
Speaker 1: at the same time, so you maybe hit more of
Speaker 1: these buttons. You get the core exercise, you get, the strength,
Speaker 1: you get, the breathing, you get, the stretching, all of
Speaker 1: these things in one. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's one of the things about yoga that when I
Speaker 3: take it in a class that I wish is that
Speaker 3: it would slow down, you know, because you're moving on
Speaker 3: the in and the out breath. You know, is that
Speaker 3: the movement would span a longer breath more to that,
Speaker 3: you know, five in five out count, which is that's
Speaker 3: what six breass per minute works out to, right, Five
Speaker 3: on the inhale, five on the exhale.
Speaker 1: So the kind of yoga that I really fell in
Speaker 1: love with so about ten years ago more than that
Speaker 1: now is ashtanga. And you don't follow the.
Speaker 4: Instructor to do your own pace, right.
Speaker 1: You do your own pace. And that's when it really
Speaker 1: clicked for me that I wasn't breathing now, breathe out now,
Speaker 1: It's like, well, how do you know when my lungs
Speaker 1: are full? You know? But if you're doing it at
Speaker 1: your own pace, you can really you can really feel
Speaker 1: it when you get going. I have got into that
Speaker 1: state of being and just calm and awareness of my body,
Speaker 1: and it's an amazing feeling. And you don't necessarily get
Speaker 1: that if somebody's dictating your breath, that's right.
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah, yeah, I always find that. I'm like,
Speaker 3: the speed is off for me.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I found the six breast per minute. I think certain
Speaker 3: people call it coherent breathing. Fascinating that that is the
Speaker 3: rate that ties to a lot of ancient prayer type practices.
Speaker 3: And then three breasts per minute does take a little
Speaker 3: bit of effort, but it's interesting. I'm practicing a little
Speaker 3: bit differently now, but for a while I was a
Speaker 3: very focused Zen Buddhist, so I was really doing that
Speaker 3: type of meditation. But if you go back further into
Speaker 3: the Zen tradition, there is talk about controlling your breath
Speaker 3: in a way that doesn't typically show up in what
Speaker 3: we think about with meditation, and it was about this
Speaker 3: very light so you're not moving a lot of air,
Speaker 3: but you're doing it, you know, closer to what you're describing,
Speaker 3: which is that at you know, three breasts per minute.
Speaker 4: That's really interesting.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you don't have to be sort of huffing
Speaker 1: and puffing and making real effort, but what you're doing
Speaker 1: is sort of taking control and sort of controlling the rate.
Speaker 1: The research we suggest that what you're doing is really
Speaker 1: sort of slowing down the activity of the brain, and
Speaker 1: then that can get you into the state of zen
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, the state of being and being
Speaker 1: at one with the universe.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think that's what makes slow breathing hard
Speaker 3: for a lot of people is we tend to equate
Speaker 3: slow breathing with deep breathing, which we then sort of
Speaker 3: naturally equate with moving a lot of air. So there's
Speaker 3: this like, you know this strong you can't inhale that
Speaker 3: forcefully for ten seconds, Like it didn't work that way.
Speaker 3: It's a much lighter, moving less air h long that
Speaker 3: period of time. So, listeners, what resonated for you while
Speaker 3: listening to that? What came up for you when thinking
Speaker 3: about how you could be feeding your good wolf? This month?
Speaker 3: When I think about feeding my good wolf, I've been
Speaker 3: thinking a lot about relationships. Relationships really shape the quality
Speaker 3: of our lives in profound ways. When they're healthy, they
Speaker 3: bring joy and fulfillment, but when they're struggling, the impact
Speaker 3: can be deeply unsettling. It's a common struggle but one
Speaker 3: that often goes unaddressed. The good news there are concrete
Speaker 3: skills we can learn to improve our relationships. Relationships are
Speaker 3: this month's theme and our weekly Bite of Wisdom for
Speaker 3: a Wiser, Happier You newsletter, and I'd love to send
Speaker 3: them your way. Every week we send a menu of
Speaker 3: a few small exercises you can put into practice to
Speaker 3: feed your good wolf, along with the reflection and a
Speaker 3: related podcast episode on the topic. If you want to
Speaker 3: go deeper, just head to Goodwolf dot me slash relationships.
Speaker 3: If you think you'd benefit from these useful reminders and
Speaker 3: small bite size exercises to help you feed your good wolf,
Speaker 3: I'd love to send them to you for free. Just
Speaker 3: head over to Goodwolf dot me, slash relationships and I'll
Speaker 3: send them your way. Thank you so much, Caroline for
Speaker 3: coming on the show. Thank you so much for this
Speaker 3: wonderful book that teaches us so much about how to move.
Speaker 3: And you've just got a line which is basically the
Speaker 3: messages move more in your brain will thank you in
Speaker 3: the long run and in the short.
Speaker 1: Run absolutely yeah, yeah, your life will be better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the worst that can happen?
Speaker 3: You've moved you get healthier, You've.
Speaker 4: Had a good time. Yeah, you can always sit down afterwards.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, at the end of the book, I
Speaker 1: talk about rest and the importance of rest. It's not
Speaker 1: about necessarily getting more exercise in It's about moving your
Speaker 1: body around more and it doesn't have to hurt. You
Speaker 1: don't even have to change your clothes and shoes. You
Speaker 1: just have to remember that you're an animal that needs
Speaker 1: to move and stretch and breathe.
Speaker 4: And make sure you do that.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: For having me. It's been lovely to talk to you.
Speaker 4: I think I've led a lot.
Speaker 3: To Thank you so much for listening to the show.
Speaker 3: If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking,
Speaker 3: I'd love for you to share it with a friend.
Speaker 3: Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of
Speaker 3: what we do. We don't have a big bu budget,
Speaker 3: and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something
Speaker 3: even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button
Speaker 3: on your podcast app or send a quick text with
Speaker 3: the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your
Speaker 3: support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom
Speaker 3: one episode at a time. Thank you for being part
Speaker 3: of the one You Feed community.