Adulting - #61 Mental Health In The Time Of Corona with Kimberley Wilson

Episode Date: April 25, 2020

Hey Podulters, in this episode I speak to Kimberley Wilson (@foodandpsych) about anxiety, brain health and getting to know yourself and your thoughts, especially during quarantine. Kimberley is a chartered psychologist, with an MSc in nutrition and author of 'How To Build A Healthy Brain'. I hope you enjoy the episode, please do rate, review and subscribe, O xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. Hello poddleters. In this week's special quarantine episode, I am speaking to Kimberly Wilson, who is food and psych on Instagram. She's a chartered psychologist, she has an MSc in nutrition, and she is the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain. So I spoke to her the other day about how we can look after our mental health, our brain function, our general well-being whilst we're in quarantine. And especially in this time when maybe, just maybe, there's a little bit more space

for self-introspection and looking deeper into ourselves. And that boredom actually might make some feelings come up that we haven't really had time to explore before. So we go into all of those conversations about anxieties we might be feeling at this time, why it's important to not feel too stressed and lots of other amazing things. I absolutely love speaking to Kimberley.

I found it so insightful and interesting and I hope you do too. So here you go, mental health in the time of corona. Enjoy. Bye. Hello and welcome to Adulting. Today I am joined by Kimberley Wilson. Hi there. Thank you so much for joining me on this very futuristic online calls. It's weird not being able to see you. But for those people who don't know who you are and what you do, please could you tell us about yourself and your work? Yeah, my name is Kimberley Wilson. I am a chartered psychologist and I work in private practice at the moment and specifically around what I call whole body mental health, which is helping people to understand the impact and implication of all aspects of their daily lives.

So whether that's nutrition, movement, their management of stress on their mental health concerns, and then using those things to help support mental health alongside therapy and alongside that I also do a lot of work at the intersection between food and psychology so issues around IBS and the gut brain access which is a stress associated illness but also disordered eating and eating disorders and unusual relationships with food so um food and psych is pretty much what I do. It's so interesting and I love that what you do is all about that holistic kind of 360 approach to health because as you say I think we hone in a lot of the time on really specific things which actually if you're not looking at

the bigger picture and how all of that stuff functions together, then it's really unlikely that you're going to be able to make like a positive change. And the one thing that I find really interesting that you do focus on a lot is you talk about brain health. And I think we've all become quite familiar with why we need to exercise and the things that we're eating. And we talk about it usually from like a very body specific point of view but we never really talk about how our brains are and I wondered if you could expand on that a little bit because I know that you've just written a book on this topic which I think is fascinating. Yeah so it's a very strange position that we've kind of found ourselves in in terms of health care because we

don't consider the brain to be a central feature of health, even though, of course, everything about you, your personality, the words you use, the language that you speak, the decisions that you make, all of your dreams, hopes, ambitions, everything comes from your brain. And so the idea that we're not considering brain essential to our existence or our health is a bit odd to me. And I don't think it's anybody's specific fault because actually psychology and psychiatry are at the centre of this kind of strange separation as completely separate from the body almost, you know, that your thoughts are ethereal, they come from the sky, and they're nothing to do with the rest of you. And therefore, if something goes wrong with your thoughts or your behaviours, you know, we need to try to find some abstract way of interacting or intervening in them, which doesn't really make sense because actually of course your

thoughts your mind your behaviors are a function of your brain and your brain is a physical organ inside your head and like all of the organs in your body relies on proper care you know through nutrition through aspects of movement through through emotional regulation, through good psychological habits in order to function properly. And so it's very strange to me that we don't think about the brain and that there isn't a mental health or health campaign, a public health campaign for the brain in the same way that there is for cancer or for heart disease you know Alzheimer's is our leading cause of death in the UK where is the public health campaign for the brain and that's really why I wrote the book. It's funny because I also think in this moment in time

being sub-doctor about the brain we definitely do we have a better attitude towards mental health I think hopefully and that's kind of improving over time and more and more people are seeking out therapy. And I wondered if like therapy is kind of something I've thought about just because I almost wonder if everyone can benefit from it. And when, in order to look after our brains, do you think that we all kind of need not necessarily therapy, but that style of looking after our wellbeing alongside, you know, eating the nutritious food and the exercising, like, is the way that we look after our brains through that kind of work? Or is it everything all together? I don't know if that makes sense. So I think that while everybody could probably benefit from therapy in as far as it's worth knowing how you think, who you are, having

a sense of yourself, having a good relationship with yourself. Perhaps not everybody needs therapy in order to kind of live a happy life. So, you know, I'm not one of those people that says, you know, everybody needs to be in therapy. But I think in the same way that, you know, perhaps you'd just be interested to go for a health check to find out and make sure that everything's kind of taking over physically. But why would you not want to go in for a kind of brain health check and ensure that the way that you approach problems, or the way that you relate to your own body, or the way that you relate to your own body or the way that you think about the future is ticking over in a way that's most beneficial for you. So, you know, I think there's still a lot of stigma. We've changed or we're changing the conversation around mental health, but there's

still a lot of stigma around therapy. And there are a lot of people out there that think it's about weakness and, you know, helping people who can't, who don't have what it takes to help themselves, rather than looking at it as a tool, you know, that you can talk to a professional who has trained for many years in the most optimal and helpful and healthy ways of thinking, being, behaving and approaching issues in your life and as you just said that I'm thinking about like one of my favorite sayings which is you can't control what happens to you you can only control how you react to it and I guess what you're saying there as well is you can learn the tools of how to take a situation and you know deal with it in the most positive and helpful way and especially right now when we're going through this pandemic which is uncharted waters is such a tired phrase at the minute but when everything might seem out of your control someone who as you say has really good brain health and

who has looked into their psyche and trying to understand themselves a bit better might have more peace of mind when faced with challenges which as you say I think everyone could benefit from and with you've kind of been talking about on your Instagram a lot but we're talking about flattening the curve but you've been talking about flattening the curve of anxiety I was wondering if not just only in this moment but I feel like I'm getting anxious as I get older which I think is kind of normal like you feel a bit more I don't know if it's just you're more aware of your mortality or if you just feel a bit more general but do you think as a society that we are it's the million dollar question isn't it are we talking about mental health more so more people are coming forward with feelings of anxiety or

depression or other general mental illness mental health issues or do you think that the our modern day lives are exacerbating our feelings of anxiety and depression I understand that that maybe um so I think that's a giant question um and I think I think first of all yeah you're absolutely right that there is a you know there's an increasing sense of awareness of your mortality. You know, we call it the existential anxiety that creeps in as you get older. And it's classically what causes the midlife crisis. You know, you're suddenly confronted with a point in your life where the years ahead that you can expect to have are perhaps smaller than the years that you've already had behind you. And so that can be quite startling and

confronting for a lot of people. I think in terms of what we're seeing in relation to increasing rates of mental illness, I think there are a few factors probably at play. I think, yes, of course, making the environment more accepting and conducive of conversations around mental health does contribute to more people coming forward and asking for support and more use of services which will will be represented in in the reports and the research that says there's there's more utilization of mental mental health services but i think there is also something about our modern lives that is either or perhaps both more anxiety inducing, but actually undermines our normal mental health resilience. And so, for example, one of the things that drives anxiety largely

is uncertainty. And increasingly, for younger generations, much more of life is uncertain. You know, will I get a job when I leave school or university? Will that job be secure or will I be on, you know, short contracts or, you know, freelance contracts or, you know, other ways in which I don't have the stability of a regular income? Will I be able to find somewhere to live that I can afford? Will I be able to buy my own house? You know, the way in which a lot of our relationships are now more disparate, we move away from family, we are too busy to see friends. So our usual sources of support and coping with difficulty aren't available to us. So those sorts of things might actually increase our risk of mental health concerns and undermine our resilience. But there's also a new wave of thinking, which is about the shift in society that started around

the 80s and 90s, which really gave the sense that things are much more frightening. So with the increase in available news, what we get is a higher sense of threat and danger and risk in the world. And if you're being fed the story that the world is very unsafe for you, it's very dangerous and to watch out, there's someone waiting around the corner that can harm you, then that will undermine one's sense of safety and increase the risk of experiencing psychological health concerns. So I think there's a lot going on. It's a very mixed picture. Yeah, it's really interesting to think about, I guess, from that point of view of where the world and society and like tech has evolved, maybe past like how we've evolved. So even though

we feel like we've all adapted to this new age and the technology and the social media and whatever else, perhaps, I mean, I don't know, our brains are still wanting to exist in a world which is a bit more tribal and, you know, we're not looking at computer screens and we're only knowing how many people it is. You mentioned 150 people. I think it was in Hans Wessling's Fatfulness where he talks about how you know because we can see all over the world like the news from every single country is exactly what you're saying you feel so overwhelmed with information but actually if you look at the rates of how many people die every year and all the statistics on how healthy people are and how long our lives are like that line would show that actually as a race, humanity is much better off than it was before,

even though we're so overwhelmed with news. But how can we, if our brains haven't adapted to living this world, but we have to kind of be in it and be a part of it, how do you manage to still get on with your day-to-day life, use social media, because you use it as part of your work, and be in this world without kind of letting all of it become overwhelming which I'm sure all of us have experienced yeah I think I think you're right that there is a way in which society has evolved much faster than our brains have and the brain of course is hugely adaptable but you know when it's

that outpaced then you're still using quite old software really for quite a futuristic environment um I manage it by essentially trying to strip back anything that's unnecessary so um I do use Instagram for my work but I don't spend a huge amount of time on there actually um you know I kind of post and I'll check in with friends, but I won't kind of passively or meaninglessly scroll for hours and hours and hours. I try to have as many of my social contacts as possible in person and including my podcast. So it makes it a bit awkward in terms of arranging things, but I try, I know that my brain likes, you know, all of our brains want in-person contact. They want to see facial expressions.

You want to be in the presence of another person. So I try not to over-rely on, you know, virtual calls and those sorts of things. So trying to have as much in-person contact and connection as I possibly can. And then in ways that are kind of reasonable, try to recreate some of those situations that your brain will be accustomed to. So, you know, lots of natural light, spending as much time in natural light as possible, regular physical activity, a more unprocessed natural diet as much as possible, in making time for relaxation and peace you know I'm not the kind of person who feels like I have to constantly be pushing and

pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing you know and ticking boxes I know that my brain is not set up for that so I don't try to treat it like that so really trying to be respectful of the fact that all of our brains are coping with way more information and data and stimulation than it is currently evolved for and just trying to strip back anything that's strictly unnecessary for like my day-to-day function. I love that you said all of that especially the natural light thing I'm so funny about I hate lights and in my flat I always work from home and I will sit there and as the light drops, I won't realize and I'll just keep working

and someone will come in and I'll be kind of sat in pitch black. I think my eyes have just adjusted from the light going darker. And about podcasts as well, I've only just started doing them online because of this pandemic. And I always want to have meetings face-to-face.

And it's funny because all of those things, I would be like, oh God, it's really annoying that I find it really difficult to have meetings face to face and it's funny because all of those things I would be like oh god it's really annoying that I find it really difficult to have a call and process that information I'd much rather go and meet with the person have a coffee and talk about it because I found it really hard to remember not literally remember it but get really invested in something if I'm not physically around someone so hearing you say you know that it makes sense why you would want that that kind of makes me feel a bit better because that that productivity idea the hustle culture that you spoke of is something which I personally find really stressful because I don't think I don't like that either I really don't like cramming loads of things into time and I do like getting my eight hours sleep and sometimes

it can feel like the things that you need to do for your health are really at odds with what capitalism kind of wants you to do and what it means to be successful and I guess we could I could like to ask you about how it is really important that in every sense of our lives that we do put our health first because it's going to increase productivity in that time that you are working and I think sometimes that's a balance which gets really lost in the conversation we kind of split up people who are healthy and then people who are successful as if you can't manage those two things together which you really should be I kind of feel like I've fluffed the way of explaining that but I'm sure you know what I mean yeah um and I think I kind of would take a step back from there. And I'm always asking people, why do you need to be so productive? You know, what are you trying to do? And really questioning the idea of value as coming as an outcome of your productivity.

And I know it's the way in which we're all socialized and how, you know, academically we're shaped, you know, that each step of schooling is based on how high you can get your scores, you know, in order to get into the next phase, in order to get into the next phase, in order to get into the next phase to have a good job and a big house and whatever else it is. And so I think what people don't probably do often enough is question what success means for them. So many people are living with this inherited idea, either inherited from their parents or their family or their culture, or from our immediate kind of, as you say, capitalist environment of what success is. And so lots of

people are kind of contorting themselves into all sorts of strange shapes in order to tick all the boxes and get it done and be seen to be living their best life in a way which if they stopped for just five minutes to question whether the things that they're doing are the things they would want to be doing, given the choice, you know would be quite quite different so i think the first thing is always to question your assumptions you know what is success why is it important to you how is it going to be measured how will you know if you're successful because again people will end up you know from the outside looking massively successful to everybody else but because they haven't set a measure for themselves or maybe they set an arbitrary

measure for themselves, never actually get to enjoy that, the feeling of success. But, you know, back to your question, it's, I think, I think any kind of attempt at productivity without a focus on health is unsustainable. You're not going to last very long. You know, it's going to get to the point where you're running on fumes, where either you have to sustain it in an unhealthy way by cutting out your sleep, by drinking lots of coffee, by, you know, stripping back on the things that are healthy for you, like your friendships and your relationships and socialising in order to tick more of these boxes. And not only is it unsustainable, it ends up being very unfulfilling because maybe you've acquired lots of things, whether those are physical material things or accolades, but you probably feel miserable and you've got no one to share it with. So there's

a kind of big question about where people's priorities are. And I think it would be really valuable for more people to be having that kind of conversation with themselves. I love this question around what is successful. I kind of think about it all the time and it's made me a much more positive and happier person when I think that being successful to me now is just like having a good day getting done what I need to get done and not like it's it's being successful I think is being able to just enjoy things I used to have that really bad like what next thing which I guess is what you're saying happens when you don't set yourself a goal you're just constantly you achieve one thing and then you before you even think about what you've done you're on to the next

and I think we're all can be guilty of doing that so it's interesting I guess whilst we're in this quarantine period it's it's a really weird time because I think on the one hand obviously there is a probably global panic and everyone feels like a low level hum of anxiety but if you are able to switch off from that we are being afforded this time where we could really sink into thinking about how to maybe better our mental health or look after our health and obviously you don't have to do anything if you're looking after mental health doing nothing but in a time when you know we can't socialize we can't speak to our friends and we can't do some aspects of what you've spoken about how could we recoup some of this time that feels a bit weird in a way that we might come out the

other side of this with actually better understanding of our own mental health yeah i think really for you know notwithstanding anxieties around you know finances and whether people are going to be okay when we come out the other side of this there will be a big group of people who feel like they're just in a bit of a limbo at the moment they're in a bit of stasis maybe they're in a position where they have a bit of a safety cushion or that they're still getting paid from their jobs or whatever and in which case there's they're suddenly confronted with having to stop. And I say confronted with because what I find is that people aren't very good at stopping. And they find it incredibly difficult and they find

it incredibly uncomfortable. And again, that goes back to our kind of socialization of your value being wrapped up with your productivity so that if your productivity falls, then it's very difficult for a lot of people to hold on to their sense of value. If I'm not getting the grades, if I'm not working, if I'm not going to 6am spin classes and then taking pictures of it and put it on my Instagram, how will I know that I'm still valuable? So I think a lot of people are going to be confronted with what happens when they have to be still. And we think about stillness a lot in therapy and people who, for example, hate silences and feel the pressure to have to speak constantly because they don't like how they feel in a silence. And I think perhaps a lot of people at home will be feeling that,

which is what happens when you're confronted with silence and what emerges in your mind when you have to stop and things are quiet. And if there is a mental health benefit to come out of this situation, it will be people who are able to kind of engage with that level of inquiry. What goes on in my mind? What is the background script in my head? What are the voices constantly telling me that I should be doing or shouldn't be doing, should be thinking, shouldn't be saying? Where is this coming from? How helpful is it? Whose voice is it? Is it mine? Is it my mum's? Is it my faith? Does it serve me or does it not serve me? And if it does serve me, how might I begin to start shifting it into a direction that is better for me? So I think in a way that might be really unexpected, this situation might be offering some people some enforced reflection time, right? Some enforced introspection time, which perhaps they tell themselves they don't have the time to do in normal life. Well, now you do. And so I would probably encourage people to try to engage with some of those questions, you know, grab a journal,

sit by a window and look at the sky and see what comes up for you. Yeah, it's so interesting. And it can be, you're so right, the word confronting is completely right. Because I think, especially nowadays, we're constantly taking things in. Even if it's not work, I'm always listening to a podcast. I'm always reading. It's got to the point where I was, at one point, I was trying to find a podcast to listen to whilst I took my bins out,

which was going to take like seven minutes because I almost had got so accustomed to not letting myself listen to my own thoughts and I had to kind of sit with myself I'm like no you need to stop doing this because it was constant whether if I wasn't reading something I was listening to something watching something and and I think I used to tell myself oh if it's reading or podcast it's not trashy tv so that's fine but actually it's all ignoring exactly what you're saying those deep down feelings and it can be quite unsettling when you actually do kind of let yourself hide because we can't constantly distract ourselves so that's with buying clothes but like everything is a massive distraction and you're right being forced into your own head can be really something quite stressful what what tips and tricks I like all

those questions you put down to us I definitely think journaling is a really good idea but are there other tools and things that people can do if they do find it overwhelming or if they simply have never even thought about the idea of just that self-introspection because for some people they will never have done it before yeah and I suppose if you have never done it before um it will it will feel uncomfortable um because these are kinds of practices really particularly for us in the west in a modern uh lifestyle these are practices that you need to learn how to sink into and I would probably say if you if you are willing so you need to learn how to sink into. And I would probably say, if you are willing, so you need to be willing to start with, I think. And if you're not willing,

think about your unwillingness, right? Why don't I want to do this? What am I trying to avoid? What are the excuses that I come up with? Do I say it's boring or pointless? But what is the feeling underneath that? What is in my resistance um and then if you are willing then to start small right you start with 30 seconds start with you know sitting down somewhere or lying down because lying down can actually help you connect with more kind of creative or abstract parts of your your mind just you know looking at a ceiling or in particular a broad open landscape like the sky um or if you happen to manage to get some time out in a ceiling or in particular, a broad open landscape like the sky, or if you happen to manage to get some time out in a park or something like that. And start with just a minute or 30 seconds. What's what am I feeling?

You know, where and where am I feeling it? What's going on for me? And managing the overwhelm is really just by taking little sips of that. Don't try and sit down into a 40 minute meditation straight off the bat and think, you know, I'll just I'll nail this. Emotions, our experiences with ourselves, our feelings and our relationships with ourselves are complex and deeply physiological. And one of the things that I think really stops people from being able to engage with their feelings is the physical discomfort that comes with it, right? So if you think back to an embarrassing thing that you've done or more like an embarrassing thing that you have said to someone, you don't want to think about it because alongside the embarrassment, the feeling comes that physiological

awkwardness that, you know, the churning of the stomach and, you know, you feel like you can't take a breath and your whole body kind of caves in on itself. And so one of the tricks and the task of learning how to manage overwhelm or to manage big feelings is to find ways to discharge that physiological arousal. So whether that's getting, you know, using physical activity to do that, to build up that physiological resilience or doing things that will help to bring down physiological arousal. So controlled breathing is one. Similarly, singing is another. So if you need to go out for five minutes and just sing a power ballad, I recommend in the book, minutes and just sing a power ballad, I recommend

in the book, you know, singing a power ballad in the shower as a means of switching on the kind of rest and relaxation mode of your nervous system. So those sorts of things, yoga is great for this, doing a few long grounding stretches can help you with the physical part of dealing with the psychological experience of.m. every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca.

Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. Oh my God, that's so interesting. I love the bit about singing the shout.

I have to say that does, like it does make you feel amazing. And also it was funny when he said about thinking that something's embarrassing because I get such bad like cringe. And that's probably, I think, only time I ever really feel anxious is when I think back to something

that makes me feel like, oh, that really makes me feel anxious. It's the weirdest thing. And I have to actively, as you say, find a way to get out of that corner of my mind because otherwise like I get into like a spiral and it stresses me out it's it's like making me feel icky even thinking about I might have to start singing um I love those tips I think that's so like interesting to think about how everything is interlinked I think we so rarely do that um I wanted to talk a bit more

as well about I know that you were speaking a bit about that then but with the flattening the curve um of anxiety to do with what's going on at the minute you've been talking about what we are consuming and what we're looking at and we've been talking about trying to you know keep stillness in your mind but what I think can I talk about this a lot in terms of more to do with like body image and things, but curating what you're looking at can be really important. And you talk about this a lot. And I wondered if we could talk on this around the anxieties that maybe people are feeling in the pandemic and the ways that you could control that as well with external things that you're looking at.

Yeah. So I think one of the key features, probably the key feature, to be honest, about what we're experiencing with the pandemic is uncertainty. And it's worth people knowing that your brain doesn't like uncertainty, right? It's not just you. It's not just you not coping very well and feeling panicky and feeling a bit lost and confused and anxious this is fundamentally a place that your brain doesn't like to hang out very long it's why um optical illusions work right so that the whole physiology behind an optical illusion is the fact that there's a gap in the stimulus. There's a gap somewhere in the image that doesn't make sense to your brain. And so your brain fills in the gaps.

It doesn't want there to be gaps. It doesn't want there to be something uncertain. So it fills in the gaps. And then when you have to shift your perspective, suddenly something that you saw is completely different. So optical illusions tell us that our brains don't like uncertainty. And what we have right now is uncertainty on a global scale, you know, a brand new virus never before seen in the human population. Some people have symptoms, some don't. So we suddenly don't know whether the person that we're speaking to might be or us ourselves, of course, might actually have the virus at the moment and therefore could be spreading it. We don't know how long it's going to last. We don't know how severe it's going to be. We don't know how long what it's really confronted us with is some of our illusions about the things that we thought were really certain, right? So we thought for sure that there would

never be a time in our modern Western lives when we were told that we couldn't leave our houses, right? We never thought there would be a time when all of the shops are closed and you have to queue outside the supermarket to get your basics. And where the police are starting to say, we're going to start checking your bags to make sure that you are only shopping for essentials. We never thought that would happen in our lifetimes. We're so used to freedom. We're so used to autonomy in our democracies that the very idea just seems completely mad. Even if you were saying three or four weeks ago, it seems completely out of the question. So, you know, I say that just to kind of contextualize the idea that this is so unnatural to us that it will create this complete shift in the way

that we're responding. And so if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling like you're in the twilight zone and nothing makes sense, that's completely normal. And so the way to manage that is to try to shift back from the things that increase that uncertainty. And this is where I talk about reducing the amount of news you're consuming, certainly reducing the amount of conjecture, you opinion supposition opinion um pieces they're not helping you they're adding to the the noise and the cacophony of uncertainty around you they're not helping so strip that back and then to focus on the things that are within your realm of control and that's largely the things that are happening inside your house and your your daily. And one of the things I recommend is to find your anchors of normality. So that would be thinking about the three to five things in your everyday normal life before you

even heard the word coronavirus. What are the things that were kind of anchors of your week so if Friday night was always takeaway night it was you know it was always curry night then keep Friday night as curry night you know if you can you know you can still get a takeaway that's going or if you always wash your hair and do your face mask on a Saturday morning you know maybe now you have the time to do it on a Wednesday afternoon, but if you've always done it on a Saturday, always do it, keep doing it on a Saturday because it will be those little anchors of your normal life, the reality that you got accustomed to that will help you to keep a sense of who you are and a

sense of place, a sense of being grounded when everything else around you feels so so movable and and so uncertain it's so lovely like to see the way you put it then it was just so clever I don't think I've actually properly thought about why it's like obviously it's scary but I think sometimes you don't like you really zoomed out then and kind of explained what it is we're going through. Even that kind of made me feel a bit calmer because it contextualizes everything. Sometimes I think, especially if you're feeling panicked, you can only focus on the worry. And it's really, really difficult then to zoom out and be like, oh, OK, this is why I'm feeling like that.

So hearing you explain that, that was really good. And it's also made me realize why I am so fortunate because I do work from home there's very few parts of my routine which have been upturned whereas my boyfriend used to travel into work and things I think for him he does feel really weird because he's like I honestly feel like I don't know where I am and so those those pointers of stability and ways to make your day feel the same and create like that safety net environment that's that's really positive and and helpful so thank you for that um i was wondering if also we could talk about in terms of what to do for health wise because you were saying then you know like if you do certain exercise classes or if you do something normally to keep on doing it and what how important is it for our our mental health that we look after our physical health?

Because I know that we're talking about it more and more often now, but I think a lot of the time before that part of the conversation would get left out and everyone would really focus on physical health as a means to lose weight or it would be a really aesthetic thing. And I'm gladly the conversation is moving forward. So we're realizing that that physical health is helpful but I wondered if you could touch on it a bit more like how our heart health obviously I don't know if this is true I might be making this up but if you've got like a healthier heart then it might help with your like anxiety and things because that that can be just as physical physically symptomatic as mentally correct me if I'm wrong I might have just made that up no you're right but for different reasons um so it's um again it's about kind of bringing the brain and the body back together and I quite often say you know you could have the you know traditionally perfect body but if you feel miserable if you don't like yourself if you

don't feel capable of maintaining good relationships and then really what is it for it's a very fragile means for maintaining one's self-esteem so it I think it's really important to understand that there is no health without mental health. None of it makes sense without mental health. And therefore, should we not be prioritizing the brain and mental health actually ahead of this other stuff? I think where it's quite helpful is that much of it really does overlap. You know, the things that are good for your brain are good for your body and vice versa. And we quite often say the things that are good for your brain are good for your body and vice versa and we quite often say the things that are good for your heart are good for your brain right and one of the reasons for that

is because your your brain has miles and miles of blood vessels in it you know supplying all the little nooks and crannies of your brain with oxygen and nutrients and glucose and you know one of the forms of dementia is vascular dementia, which is what happens when the vessels in your brain become stiff or inflexible or clogged. And, you know, that's associated with strokes as well. And so if you're doing the things that help protect your heart, then you will automatically be helping to support your brain. And that's one of the reasons that physical activity is one of the most robust ways of reducing your risk of Alzheimer's dementia um but also the other things so people quite often forget I don't think it's easy to forget because we quite we can be

quite subjective in our existence but you are made of food, right? Everything about you, you know, down to your fingertips is something or was something that you ate at some point or the things that you drank. Yeah. And that's going to be exactly the same with your brain. So your brain is made of food and therefore it's going to be really important to think about the types of foods you're giving it and ensuring that it has the right substrates, the right building blocks in order to look after itself and to create the neurotransmitters, to do all of those enzyme reactions, to send those signals to help you have good, healthy sleep. So there's so much about the way that the body works and the impact of the body on the brain that we really miss in thinking only about aesthetics or weight loss and not thinking about this incredible organ, which is the most complex organ system, you know, machinery in the universe,

is central to our existence, but is so often neglected. Yeah, I think it's funny because I actually just recently just recorded a podcast with Becky from the Anti-Diet Riot Club, which is like an anti-diet movement. And I'm so glad that we're living in an age now where we are starting to put like our genuine health before our aesthetics. 100% when I was growing up, that wasn't the way around that it was. It kind of didn't really matter. You could be sniffing Coke, drinking wine, smoking fags, doing whatever.

This is like when I was a teenager, what all the kind of women that we would put on pedestals were doing. And as long as you were skinny that was like great and looking back at that like heroine chic era the like Kate Moss Effie from Skins it seems absolutely wild that that was like championed as being the best thing ever so it just shows in time like in the last how many years like 15 years we've come forward so far in the way that we're thinking but that rhetoric still remains that like your life is going to be better if you could somehow subscribe to this really small beauty ideal when what your work is it's I guess doing as well as telling you like to live your best life and to genuinely be

the happiest you've ever been you have to look after yourself in the way that you would sort of like look after a child like give it the best you can give and be as kind and gentle. And rather than attacking yourself to achieve this really small idea of beauty or whatever. And it really boggles my mind to think back on what I thought was important and what I thought it meant to be healthy. Like I genuinely just thought skinny was healthy even if that was achieved by you know not eating um and I'm sure like you must see this so much in your work but like do you think that we're going forward so I suppose maybe because you're working with people with disordered eating regularly it still must I think we are going forwards. And, you know, I do feel really sad that there's an entire generation, I think, about kind of women who are kind of middle aged and older who have missed this revolution in body positivity and self-acceptance because they will have lived their entire lives, you know, and some of them still are, are you know dieting and worrying about whether

they're putting on a few pounds at Christmas and I feel like it's it's incredibly sad to feel that your whole existence has been around trying to shrink yourself um so I think it is changing and I think there are so many incredible people doing great work I think we still have a ways to go. And partly, I think partly we're up against our biology in a way, in the sense that we are a very visually driven society. Not all of the way that we think about bodies is socially driven. Some of it comes from our biology in terms of, you know, attractiveness and age-related things. It gets exacerbated by our society and our culture. So there's some mitigation that can be done. I think we need to go further. And I would,

you know, I'm working towards an era where, particularly for women, we're valued for our thoughts and ideas and our contributions, first and foremost, above our bodies. And that's why, for example, I, you know, I think, I don't know if I even, I never talk about bodies, I think even anymore. You know, I talk about relationships with self and I talk about the brain. I talk about mental health, but you know, I'd like us to go even further and, you know, let's just take bodies out of the conversation altogether I think that feels quite quite radical um whether it's possible I don't know but I think it's probably what a goal worth shooting towards and we see where we land yeah I

totally agree Shona and I um had a conversation I know you know Shona actually had a conversation about this about how we were talking about how is it actually damaging to try and have this conversation around body positive? It's definitely needed, but it's still just, as you say, just honing in and focusing on physical and what women look like on the, for the most part, it's women. And we were trying to work out like, it's good because it's re-narrativizing the conversation. It is broadening the horizons of bodies we see. And I really do think it helps the body image I think my own body image has been improved by seeing a broader variety of bodies than we're used to in like tabloids and media but as you say like is the next iteration of that like the next wave of it somehow being completely

valued like your capital being for who you are as a person and what you think and what you say rather than what you look like and as it's further exacerbated by the difficulty of which we're experiencing now as well like if we can't be around people everything does become very image-based like Instagram and TikTok and it is so so visual that how how it's been I always think this like how can you be cerebral on platforms that are designed for visuals which is I actually think why I love podcasting because it is so much about your thoughts and feelings and you feel so I don't know if you got this but when I podcast I feel so much more uninhibited than if I'm being filmed or if I'm being photographed and I really feel like I'm able to access my thoughts so much better than when I'm conscious

of the fact that of what I look like it's so distracting I'm sure that that must be a normal feeling yeah I think that's absolutely the case that um if you suddenly put yourself in a position of self-objectification if you're being filmed or think you're going you're being looked at and that puts you in a position of wanting to be seen well and wanting to be perceived well. And then self-monitoring about perhaps your facial expressions or what you're doing with your hands. And that takes your attention away from the conversation

or a piece of your attention away from the conversation, away from the person that you're having that conversation with um and so yeah i completely agree that um having conversations and that's the thing that there's a lot of information going around there are a lot of opinions that but many of them tend to be one-sided people just throw out their opinions and then they bring down the barriers and not interested in hearing what the other person says back. But if we can get, if we move much more towards conversations and good faith conversations where perhaps we don't agree about things, but we're willing to listen and we're willing to concede on certain positions, that's when we're going to get growth. I think that's the difficulty of things like social media, not just that they are hugely visual and kind of really restrict our capacity

for being thoughtful, but also because they don't really create the right conditions for conversation. There can be community, there can be people contributing, but it's not a conversation in that true sense. Such a true point. And I think we've also got this weird kind of um I think you spoke about a bit before but it's when everyone wants to weigh in on a subject we suddenly become really certain that we need to have an opinion

on everything and that can really shut down natural flow and conversation and the ability to you know kind of figure things out and I think that can be a lot of like emotional stress and labor when we feel like we need to know the right things about politics and the right things about everything and I feel like that can actually hinder us in being able to have as you say there's like open conversations where we actually go do you know I don't know anything about this can we talk about it I think there's a lot of kind of ego involved in the way that we have to present ourselves constantly online. You have a lot less leeway to be fallible. The conversations I have with my friends in private are a lot more filled with pockets of misinformation and things than I

present online because you feel so worried about getting judged. And I think that must be such a hard thing for our brains to contend with because we can't learn if we can't ask questions but we feel like we have to present all the knowledge all the time straight away even when we don't know have all the information to know about it I personally find that one of the most overwhelming things about doing being online as like a presence online yeah I think you're exactly right. And I think on top of that, there's a way in which online and particularly because, you know, everything that you put online now is permanent, but what it means is that it becomes really difficult to change your mind, you know, and we really ought to think about changing your mind as something positive and to be promoted,

you know, that as you grow, as you learn be promoted you know that as you grow as you learn as you develop as you get new information the things that you used to believe become obsolete and just wrong right maybe and and therefore if you change your mind then that's a sign of growth but instead and you see in the tabloids in particular of politicians if someone changes their mind or you've done a u-turn or if say i i think we saw it really clearly with vegan bloggers who then you know started eating animal foods again you know that they were traitors and how could you do it and there's a separate emotional part about food but it's as if because your life is online and there's a paper trail and there's a permanency to it, what it means is that there's always evidence of how you used to be.

And you're not allowed to shift or change and evolve and become something new without there being someone there to bring up the receipts and say, oh, well, what about now? You know, defend yourself. And so people, the risk is, I think, that people end up having very, very small lives or portraying very, very small parts of themselves or that they don't take risks in their ideas. They don't say, hey, you said, because even if I feel differently on the inside, I'm not allowed to express that on the outside without being told that, you know, there's something fundamentally wrong with me or that I'm inconsistent. And so I think that's harmful to the way that we relate to each other, to the way that we relate to information and possibly to the way that we relate to ourselves, because it means that for some people who are particularly vulnerable to this,

they will be presenting one thing to the outside world whilst splitting off and harboring different thoughts and ideas. And that is simply not a healthy state to live in. That is so fascinating to think about. And you're so right about the vegan blog thing. I remember that being such a huge thing. And I feel like now that we've kind of redefined what veganism is and a lot of people now use plant-based and things and that terminology has kind of been rehashed um that that that environment's slightly different but you're you're entirely right and I definitely feel it with politics like there's such a um almost primal reaction to people having a difference of opinion. And I talk about the probably the most tired phase on this podcast is me talking about how

things are so polarized, but they really are. And maybe it's my final question to you, because I guess more broadly looking at the way that the psychology of society today, do you think that the reason that we are so polarizing and everyone is, as you say, trying to find that echo chamber and stick with that is because we're trying to recreate this sense of tribe because we are, for the most part, so disconnected, even when we're not in the midst of a pandemic. We are very much living lives that don't have a sense of community and it's all very fragmented. Do you think that perhaps one of the reasons for these

quite not extreme views but all of us feeling like we really need to have a really specific set of individual signifiers that say who we are so like I say I'm an intersectional feminist and I like reading and I'm I say that I vote Labour and those kind of labels allow me to find my group do you think that this is symptomatic the way that we're living yeah I think there's probably quite a lot in that that um I think as I think I said earlier on that we're living more distant lives and we're much more separated from each other but we have this innate need for connection we're a social species and we we don't survive very well by ourselves but our physical lives our physical situations often particularly for those of us who live in cities is one of you know socialization

with kind of individual pods or ones and twos that occasionally intersect with one another and that's quite different from what we innately would like and what is therefore most healthy for us i think there is a need, particularly online, to try and find your group that you belong to and then to defend it, you know, really, really intensely. And you see that every now and again, someone will pop up and say, well, you know, if someone expresses a slightly different opinion, well, I thought you believed this. And that's because it feels like a threat. If someone starts to think slightly differently, it feels like a threat to this cohesive sense of we're a tribe and we all think the same thing and we all believe in the

same things. And that's what makes us strong. And so the idea that someone starts thinking differently or harboring a different opinion or, you know, God forbid, talking to someone who's different or from a different group becomes very, very threatening and gets shut down very quickly. And so I think there is something about the triggering of this need for belonging. We want to feel like we belong somewhere. And I talk a lot about that emerging in people's self-identifying through the way that they eat. So I am keto or I am paleo or I am vegan. And that being the big signifier, that being the shorthand for your morality and your approach to life and

sometimes your politics. And it's about, I think, yeah, looking for that sense of belonging, looking for approval, looking for a group of people who will nod and clap and say, well done, you're doing great, and trying to limit the exposure to

disagreement and disapproval. But again, what that does potentially is really restrict our freedom to think and our freedom to debate and our freedom to change our minds and our freedom really at the base of it to build strong relationships because strong relationships aren't ones where there isn't any disagreement and where we all get on fine all the time and everything's perfect and don't we all think the same things? Strong relationships are ones where there can be disagreement and maybe where there can be fallouts, but where we respect each other enough fundamentally to come back together, where I can say, I disagree with your thoughts on this, but I still think you're a fundamentally decent person. And I think what we're losing in the

general rhetoric in conversation online is the idea that, you know, you can disagree with someone, but it doesn't mean you dismiss them as a human being. You know, you can disagree and still value someone as a fundamentally decent human being, and that you can grow from spending time with other minds and minds that are different from yours. Yeah, it's so fascinating. I love listening to you speak. But yeah, you're right. That idea that, you know, a person's bad when we know that no one is intrinsically, I don't think there's any such thing as a good or a bad person. We're all people and we do good and bad things. And I think you're right. We've lost the ability to see the nuance. So for instance,

you know, someone will vote for a different party than someone else and then everyone hates them. But your identity, as you say, it's a bit like labeling foods good and bad. It's like something might be more nutrient dense

or more calorie dense, but the food isn't morally bad for you or morally good for you in that sense. And I do think that's a really interesting, I think looking at the language of why we speak about things in certain ways can actually teach you a lot I've I've read I redressed how I spoke about things years ago when I had much more deceit disordered eating and the clues are all in the way that I spoke about the food and spoke about myself and actually

changed the way I spoke helped me to then change the way I acted and you speaking about that made me think about it very clever um I'm I'm conscious that you might have to go so I wanted to just last thing if anyone wants to find you or get your book or look you up I've absolutely loved speaking to you but if they want to find you where could they get you sure yeah um so the book is called how to build a healthy brain and it is I would say in all shops but the shops are closed so it's available online and also and there's an audiobook if you like and I think for everything else I guess there are two places you can go either to my website which is kimberleywilson.co and that's kimberley with an l-e-y or my instagram which is where I probably am probably most active um but on Instagram and Twitter I am food and psych so

f-o-o-d-a-n-d-p-s-y-c-h amazing thank you so much for chatting to me I've absolutely loved this conversation I'm actually excited to listen back when I edit it this is so interesting um and thank you guys for listening too I will see you next week bye Bye. Bye. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca.

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