Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #104 How Being Kind Helps Your Immune System, Reduces Stress and Changes Lives with Dr David Hamilton

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

The world is changing and people are feeling scared. What we regard as normal has been completely flipped on its head. What we need now more than ever is kindness. When you’re kind to someone, it’s not just that person who benefits. Kindness makes you happier. It’s good for your heart. It helps support your immune system. It slows ageing. It improves relationships. And it’s contagious – any small act of kindness you might perform is proven to have a ripple effect that reaches over 100 more people and I can’t think of a better message to put out there in these unique and uncertain times. My guest this week is David Hamilton, a pharmacist-turned-author with a special interest in how the mind affects the body, and vice versa. We chat about his fascination with the placebo effect and the many studies that demonstrate how the brain actually changes – and the body heals – in response to certain information. We talk at length about oxytocin, which David calls ‘the kindness hormone’, and how it’s the main contributor to heart health outside exercise. And he explains why kindness is the opposite of – and antidote to – stress. If you’re feeling powerless, or that any efforts you make at the moment are insignificant, I really hope that listening to this podcast will help. It was recorded back in February, before the scale of this pandemic could be known. And yet it feels timely to release it now, as a reminder of what is within our control, when so many other factors aren’t.  Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/104 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There was a study on doctor visits of over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu. And they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10 their immune response to the same condition was 50% higher than everyone else and it just came down to empathy how it made them feel and what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting you the function of the immune system hi my name is rongan chastji GP, television presenter and author of the best-selling books, The Stress Solution and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to

feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier we are happier because when we feel better we live more. we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 104 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rongan Chatterjee and I am your host. I hope you caught the bonus episode that I released this past week on how to manage anxiety in the face of a global pandemic. The feedback to this bonus episode has been phenomenal and many of you are

finding the practical tips on that podcast super helpful in managing your anxiety and stress levels at the moment. So if you've not heard it yet, please do try and have a listen later this week. And of course, do share it with other people in your network who you feel may benefit from the information. So this week's conversation is all about the incredible benefits of kindness. The world is changing, people are feeling scared, and what we regard as normal has been completely flipped on its head. What we need now more than ever is kindness, and this episode today will explain exactly why that is. When you're kind to someone, it's not just that person who benefits. Kindness makes you yourself happier, it's good for your heart, it helps support

your immune system, it slows aging, it improves relationships, and it's contagious. Any small acts of kindness that you might perform is proven to have a ripple effect that reaches over 100 more people. Now, I can't think of a better message to put out there in these unique and uncertain times. My guest on this week's show is David Hamilton. David is a pharmacist turned author with a special interest in how the mind affects the body and vice versa. In this week's conversation, we chat about his fascination with the placebo effect and the many studies that demonstrate how the brain actually changes and the body heals in response to certain information. We talk at length about oxytocin, which David calls the kindness hormone,

and how it's the main contributor to our heart health outside exercise. And David also explains why kindness is the opposite of, and the antidote to, stress. So if you're feeling powerless, or that any efforts you make at the moment are insignificant, I really hope that listening to this podcast will help. It was recorded back in February before the scale of this pandemic could be known and yet it feels timely to release it now as a reminder of what is within our control when so many other factors aren't. And before we get started I do need to give a quick shout out to some of the sponsors who are essential in order for me to put out regular episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. Now, Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense

whole food supplements that I have come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. As you may know, I prefer that people get all of their nutrition from food, but I do recognise that for some of us, this is not always possible. So if you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com

forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. David, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you. I'm so excited. I'm excited to talk to you. We've had a few back and forths trying to get this sorted. And then we figured this out, what, 48 hours ago? Pretty much. Less than that, I think. Less than that, yeah than that yeah it's a case of hey you're going to be a life

lessons i'm going to be a life lessons on saturday so we're both so prepared for this well look i'm hoping that as we catch up and i inquire about your work which frankly i've been super fascinated with for a long time uh Hopefully the listeners will also get carried along with that curiosity. Certainly that's my hope. Mine too. Good. Fantastic. So you've come down from?

Dunblane, Central Scotland. Famous laterally for Andy Murray and Jamie Murray, the tennis players, and obviously for the school shooting several years ago. Really lovely place, Dunblane. I took up tennis when I moved there in my mid 40s I'd never played tennis before because of the Murray Brothers? because of the Murray Brothers

see it's frowned upon if you don't if you're fit and healthy and you don't play tennis it's kind of frowned upon that's amazing isn't it? I picked up a racket for the first time

in my mid 40s and I was awful and now? well I'm working up through the leagues I've been doing a lot of mental exercises visualisation a lot of mental exercises visualization a lot of training and stuff so i love it you know fantastic three four times

that's so interesting that this small town yeah dumb lane uh i wonder if we compare the tennis participation rates in dumb lane you know the home of andy and jamie murray or certainly the former home of them uh with the rest of the United Kingdom I wonder if it's artificially skewed upwards probably definitely you know it's a really thriving tennis community yeah yeah fantastic well you mentioned a couple of things there which we'll probably come to later on but David I think I'm really fascinated by your journey. So you started working in the pharmaceutical industry and now you don't. So why don't you start by saying what you do now and then sort of share a bit of that story. What happened and how did you end up here today? Yeah, so I basically write books that really broadly cover the different ways that your mind and emotions and your behavior has physical effects, health-giving effects on the body.

So I've written a series of books on it. I give a lot of talks on it. And really, my interest in that, in fact, if I wind back even further, my interest in the pharmaceutical industry was the placebo effect. But the interest in that actually was born when I was about 11 years old. My mum had postnatal depression and she was suffering terribly. And it wasn't really understood. This was in the mid 70s after my youngest sister was born. I have three sisters.

My youngest sister was born in 1976. Postnatal depression was not well understood at the time. And my mum didn't really get the right treatment. In fact, the psychiatrist she was sent to see said, give yourself a shake. But asking a woman with postnatal depression to give herself a shake is like asking someone with a broken leg to run it off, I suppose. And my mum really, it really shattered her self-esteem and she started she would feel really low about herself and like she's just not a strong person and and so she

suffered terribly for a few years and as a young child I could tell my mum was struggling and I didn't really know what was wrong and I remember one day I'd only just started secondary school and this might sound really corny right I don't know if I bumped my bag off the off the shelf but a book fell off the shelf and it was called the magic power of your mind and I'm just 11 years old magic power of your mind Walter Germain and I thought I've got I bet that can help my mum so I just took it I put it in my bag and I didn't know you're supposed to join a library you know yellow, get the little yellow card stamp. But it totally helped my mum. It didn't, you know, cure depression in a day,

but it gave her tools and strategies like what we now call mindfulness. It gave her those kind of things that helped her navigate a course through the difficult times. So as I grew up in my teenage years, my mum would often use affirmations and she would do meditation

and she'd say things like, I can do it, it's all in the mind, mind over matter. So having these conversations with my mum, it's no surprise that my interest became the power of the mind and what your mind can do and the effect your mind has on your body. So when I ended up working in the pharmaceutical industry, developing drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer,

most of my colleagues would be celebrating when you hear that one of the drugs that we've participated in is working. But I was so fascinated with how many people were improving on placebos. And it was so interesting to me. And I think because my mum had learned about mental strategies that could help her a little bit

and navigate that course through some of those difficult days. So I was so fascinated after four years of really my own many research projects, just reading and learning everything I could, I decided to resign because my passion then was to educate people on, to write and to speak, to educate on how we can harness this overall effect you know to to improve our health and to you know make life a little bit better for us yeah i mean thanks for sharing that

it is a fascinating story when your mum was unwell and you brought home that book uh about the power of the mind you know how old were you and what were you interested in at school at that time I was 11 years old my mate I just started secondary school so but my main my my passion I guess at school if you could call it a passion when you're 11 was mathematics and so when I went to high school it was maths and science was my big things I really I used the word I hated English and it's funny you know if someone had said to me as a child you will write lots of books one day I'd have laughed at them you know me writing books because it was just maths and science is all I was interested in. Well that's that's interesting

because you picked up that book for your mum at the age of 11. Now look my kids aren't yet 11. My son's nine. And I'm going to guess that 11 is still at that age where it's still naive enough to kind of believe in stuff and have faith, let's say. And I'm just wondering, you know, as you got through your education and, you know, studied science more and more to a higher and higher degree uh did you ever start to get skeptical about the importance of the mind

because it's not really something we're taught at school it's not something we're taught in science it's not something we're taught at medical school and a lot of your work now is showing the beautiful science that actually exists around kindness, around the placebo, around the power of the mind. So I'm super fascinating. Did you go through this period of scepticism somewhere and then come out the other side or what happened? Surprisingly, not so much. What I would say is I just forgot about it. You know, you get so, I mean, I got so engrossed in my degree. You know, I did chemistry, then my PhD was organic chemistry and you get so engrossed in my degree. You know, I did chemistry, then my PhD was organic chemistry, and you get so engrossed in it that I actually just forgot, really.

I remember reading Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking, when I was halfway through my PhD, and it almost reminded me of the passion I had. I remember, you know, I was literally in the middle of my second year of my PhD and all of a sudden ignited, reading this book ignited my passion. It was the memory I had of, I'm so interested in, you know, at the time the book was just about positive thinking, but it wasn't just about positive thinking. I looked at that as not just about positive thinking, that I'll say positive things and

positive things happen. It was more about the attitude that you were bringing to situations to change how you felt about something. And that's the message I got. And I thought, this is what I love. And so during my PhD, I started to really dream, daydream, I suppose, that one day I would write a book about the mind. And I had no idea what I would write about me right I mean even at the time the idea of writing but it just seemed like something I knew I had to do one day. So you're working for a pharmaceutical company you're there with your team with your colleagues trying to develop drugs that have been designed to help people you know you said

something about the placebo effect, which I find super interesting. So, you know, for people who are not familiar, the way we often analyze drugs is we do something called a randomized control trial. So, you know, very, very crudely speaking, you take two groups of people, you know, let's say there's 200 people there, and you're testing a drug for blood pressure and 100 people get the drug for blood pressure 100 people don't they get just a sugar pill is that right yep and then you see who has um you know has there been a statistically significant uh increase or benefit in one of the groups i.e the group who's taking the drug ideally i guess if that's what you're studying and it's done because often placebo has been certainly my interpretation of this as a medic is that oh if it's just the same as placebo then the drug doesn't

work is the very simplistic explanation and if it's beyond that to a certain degree we like okay this drug actually works it's beyond the kind of placebo thing, right? In almost a derogatory way. But nonetheless, if you think about it, even if in that hundreds, let's say that group who don't get the drug, a hundred people who've got blood pressure or high blood pressure, if 10 of them get better on taking the placebo and 20 get better on taking the pharmaceutical drug

well the placebo is still doing something right yeah and is that what is that what happened with you you thought hold on a minute well how can we explain that pretty much and and seen it because because i was a chemist so close to building the drug i I mean, literally, organic chemists like me, it's like adults who play with Lego blocks, but instead of taking Lego blocks of different shapes and sizes and assembling them into shapes, we take building blocks of different shapes

and sizes called atoms. But the principle is the same, sticking them together. So I was so close to the actual, the chemistry of it. And I just found it so fascinating that large numbers of people were improving on the placebos and I remember asking my colleagues and they would just dismiss it oh it's just a placebo and it was a sweeping movement of the

right hand even left-handed just I think you learn that on your first day it's just a placebo effect and I came to realize that nobody actually understood it at all they had no idea how it really worked so that's why out of curiosity I wanted to understand what happens and now we actually understand that for a number of different conditions when a person believes they're receiving a drug the brain produces its own natural substances to deliver what they expect so for example if someone takes a painkiller, a placebo, what they think it's a painkiller, then it works. It can work really, really well depending on the language or empathy

used by the person who suggested they take it. But the reason why it works isn't just, as my colleague said, it's not really, they're not getting better, they just think they're getting better. But in actual fact, believing that this is a drug caused their brain to produce natural versions of morphine. So morphine is an opiate. We have our natural versions and they're called endogenous opiates, meaning they're endogenous to you. They belong to you.

So the brain produces endogenous opiates because you believe something. So the reduction in pain for example isn't just all in the mind it's a real physical change caused by real chemical changes in the brain produced by what you expect is supposed to happen when you take this little pill and it was that type of thing realizing there's a scientific basis for belief and it was building the evidence and yeah I spent hours in the library, in the company, just researching, gathering all the papers I could find. And it was just so interesting.

And I thought, no one really knows about this. Professionals, lay people don't really understand. Did we almost not want to know about it because it didn't fit our societal narrative that we're trying to find new and better technologies, whether it was a drug, whether it's another treatment, that's going to help. But it can't just be the power of positive thinking, right? I mean, I guess you find what you're looking for, right? So if people aren't looking for that, it's easy to, you know, diminish it and just think, you know, it and just think it doesn't matter and i i've got to say you know i think

still as a medical profession i don't think we take the placebo seriously enough and i mean what do you think you know do you think things have changed in the last 10 20 years it's definitely changing i think when i i left the pharmaceutical industry you know back in 1999 so just over 20 years ago and it's definitely changing. People are far more aware of it, of the way in which even the way you talk to someone, how that can make them feel. In fact, there was a study on doctor visits

over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu. And they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between zero and 10 on the empathy that they showed for during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition was 50% higher than everyone else. And it just came down to empathy. How it made them feel. And what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system. And I think that's the key, isn't it? That it's not just in your head.

It's changing things biologically, physiologically. Absolutely. Dave, when I hear that, it reminds me of something that I often say, I've said it to the public before I've said it when I teach doctors, that the number one skill for any healthcare professional, for me, is their ability to connect. Absolutely. And then secondly to that, communicate with the person in front of them.

For me, that trumps knowledge any day of the week. And I've just seen that time and time again. And that sort of fits in with what you're saying, right? It's empathy. It's empathy. If you feel, as a human being, if you feel heard, if you feel listened. Absolutely. it does something, you know, A, you're more receptive to hearing what comes next. So I would say it's connection first, education second. Yeah.

Because when you've connected with them and they feel heard by you, they're open to listening to what you have to say. Whereas if you just go charging in and say, look, you need to lose weight, get to the gym a bit more. You know what? You know, this is why a lot of people say, oh, patients don't do what we ask them to do. Well, I think the reason they don't ask, they don't do what we ask them to do yeah well i think the reason they don't ask they don't do what we ask them to do as a profession

is because a lot of the time we're not communicating it in a way that makes sense to them and and actually deeply connects with them i know and it's that deep connection has tremendous physical effects in fact one of the one of the side effects i suppose of that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the Mother Teresa effect. I think it was a study, I think it was at Yale or one of the other big American universities they got over a hundred people to

watch a video of a 50 minute video of Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta demonstrating care and compassion to homeless people. And at the end of the study, their levels of a little immune antibody in the saliva called SIGA went up by about 50%

for no reason other than just watching the video. And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards. And that's because for the hour or two afterwards, they were still talking about didn't remember that part when mother Teresa she sat down beside that old really elderly gent and they didn't say a word she just sat beside him she took his hand and laid her head against his shoulder just so that he wouldn't feel alone at that time and just that emotional bonding experience of watching them on that video spiked the immune system it just lifted that little antibody level so it's not

just the person who received that it's also if you're watching that absolutely it's watching it as well because it comes down to how it makes you feel if you can feel a sense of connection from being the person who in this case is delivering kindness or compassion being on the receiving end or watching someone else whether it's live or even on a video it has more or less the same effect and i guess you know that could be why you know if you watch a really good film that really moves you and connects you and you feel like crying or you feel like you've really connected with it yeah i don't know that's been studied but i wouldn't it has actually has it so there was a clip of of oprah winfrey during the time of the oprah show and she was she i forget

the exact nature of the clip but she was really changing people's lives and it was something to do with a school teacher in a class and what people watching it were moved to tears and felt so uplifted and it produced high levels of what I call the kindness hormone oxytocin it's also called the bonding hormone the hugging the cuddle chemical but it produced high levels of that simply by feeling and moved and inspired by watching a like a five minute clip from from what used to be the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah, I mean, it's really incredible. And this is right up my street. Honestly, this is becoming clearer and clearer to me

as every year passes since I qualified for medical school and I gain more experience and more experience. I see more patients. This, for me, is the missing link in healthcare that not everything can be quantified with just blood results and test results and just so we'll do this do that there's just something deeper um and that that is something that for me is what it means to be a human being because whether we're a patient or you know we're not a patient we're

all humans and there are some fundamental truths for humans we're social beings we like to be connected with others what you said about secretory or siga is so interesting to me um i've also studied immunology and for people wondering what siga is um we all know about the immune system which helps you know fight off infections and viruses and bacteria and all kinds of things and a lot of your immune system maybe 70 or so the immune system activity is in and around your gut which is super interesting um and that's called your mucosal immune system and the primary the main sort of defense molecule of that is srgs secretory rgs it's a thing that that can go up with this kind of compassion compassion being practiced yeah it's incredible aren't there

there are studies aren't there about uh recovering quicker from colds i think and the flu when what was something to do with compassion yeah i i I think there's some research looking at the more compassion that, let's say, a doctor feels. It was part of this relational empathy study that the people who had scored the doctor the highest, in other words, the interpretation of that, is they felt listened to and they felt connected and more warm and connected with the doctor. Their recovery rate was about 50% faster than everyone else.

It really just came down to how much empathy, how much of a connection was initiated by the doctor. I mean, that's incredible. Isn't that amazing? They recovered 50% faster compared to people when there wasn't enough contact and connection during the consultation. Yeah, I find the idea that it's not just the giver,

but the receiver or the watcher also gets the biochemical change. And I don't know if you're familiar with someone called Professor Francis McGlone. I interviewed him on the podcast about a year ago. He helped me actually write the chapter on touch in my second book book the stress solution he's it's one of the world's leading researchers in touch basically lovely and he's done some incredible you should check it out actually because it's completely aligned with a lot of the work that you do um and he talks about you know these two different kinds of touch nerve fibers you've got one which is the fast one which simply tells you where you've been touched you know you know if i touch you on your forearm you know oh wrong

has just touched me on my forearm but if you stroke someone on the forearm it does something completely different absolutely and well i mean his his work has shown that it's a different kind of nerve fiber it's called the the ct afferent that goes up to a different part of the brain, the emotional brain. And when you get that stroke, oxytocin levels go up, blood pressure goes down, heart rate goes down, natural killer cells, which are part of your immune system,

go up, I think, 50 to 70%. So we're seeing a similarity, but also that most of those C-tactile afferent nerve fibers, so that slower nerve fibre that gives you that nice, warm, cuddly feeling, most of them are on your upper back and your shoulder. Is that right? Yeah, so what's fascinating about that is, is that why would evolution put something like that on a very hard- access place well his view and my view is that

well it must have been there to promote that sort of social connection so you would have to be with someone to stroke you there yeah and so the touch giver you know gets just as many benefits as the touch receiver people who've got a pet, you know, stroking your pet makes you feel good, but it also makes your pet feel good. But this is not just in your head, oh, it feels good, right? As you're showing, and as Francis McGlone has shown,

it changes things biochemically. And for me, it's fascinating. It's the same hormone, oxytocin. So, you know, I mean, what do you make of that? See, actually, you mentioned the animal thing. I love animals. I lost my dog a few years ago. He had bone cancer.

He was only two years old as well. And so I started looking at the links between bonding with animals and oxytocin. And one of my favorite statistics that I got out of that research is the chances of a second heart attack within 12 months in someone who's had one already, if have a dog it's 400 percent less and it's not just through the exercise it's through a lot of it some of it is through the oxytocin generated through the bonding front page of science you know one of the top ranked science journals in the world front page about 10 years ago picture of a yellow labrador and in the study, they compared people with a good relationship with dogs versus people with a not so good relationship. The way they quantified it is they videoed them and they watched them interacting with the dogs. And if someone

made frequent eye contact and sustained the eye contact for a few seconds, they were called long gazers. So they were defined as good relationships if they made eye contact less frequently and not quite as long, then they were called short gazers. So not as good relationships. So after 30 minutes of interacting, amazingly, oxytocin levels had increased by about 350% in the human and nearly doubled in the dog for doing nothing other than warm playful interactions

rubbing the tummy just warm interaction you get the same thing with humans but the reason i mentioned that is because you mentioned dogs here and i love animals and and amazingly and that i believe is one of the main reasons the main contributors outside of exercise to the cardiovascular benefits because oxytocin has tremendous cardiovascular benefits well well let's expand on that because that is a novel concept for people that um the sort of things you're talking about uh human touch connection uh stroking you know all these kind of i guess what we would call the softer components of health, you're saying alongside physical exercise, physical activity is the most important thing for your cardiovascular health. I don't think many people would be familiar with that as an idea.

Just warmth and connection because they produce oxytocin. So you can create that sense through generosity and kindness, compassion, empathy, anything that generates that sense of warmth and connection we know produces oxytocin. But what's interesting is all the research showing the physiological effects of, I call it the kindness hormone, really to distinguish between stress hormones. Because physiologically in many ways kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel. I mean if you ask anyone what's the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel. I mean, if you ask anyone, what's the opposite of stress? Most people say, oh, it's peace or it's calm, but that's not technically the opposite of stress. That's the absence of stress. Physiologically speaking, if you look at the physical effects of stress and you look at the physical effects of the feeling

that you get through kindness, which is warmth and connection, then they're physiologically opposite. Even psychologically, there's some studies showing that you know emotionally we get the opposite effects because because many of the physical effects of stress are not because of a situation but because of how you feel when you're in that situation because two people could be stuck in traffic and one person's feeling stressed and they're producing adrenaline and cortisol the other person's feeling relaxed they're not producing much at all so it's's not necessarily the traffic, it's how you feel. So the feelings of stress generate stress hormones, but when you be kind and those feelings you get of warmth and connection, they generate oxytocin, I call this, I call it a kindness hormone, to make that

distinction that it's a physical, it's a hormone that gets produced because of how you're feeling in that moment, which you initiate through empathy, compassion, touch, emotional warmth, any of these soft behaviours. And understanding this explains a large body of research that we knew the trend in the past, but we didn't know why it worked that way. For example, why people with better quality of relationships have better cardiovascular systems.

Why things like hostility and aggression is correlated with higher levels of hardening of the arteries. We didn't know why that is, but now the evidence seems to suggest that, you know, aggression and hostility, for example, reduce levels of the kinase hormone, oxytocin.

And therefore we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin and therefore we we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin is now now called a cardio protective hormone meaning it protects the cardiovascular system one of the ways it does it is to to reduce blood pressure so so i i love explaining it in that sense that it's physically the opposite of stress because of how it makes you feel so you can feel that way through being the giver being the receiver or being the person who's watching a nice moment taking place yeah david my mind is blown this is um yeah this is so fascinating so fascinating and

i'm drawing all kinds of connections in my head over things i've been talking about for years things i've noticed with patients and this is filling in a few more gaps and it's all starting to knit together. You know, you may have seen the study, I think it was published three or four years ago, which suggested that the feeling of being lonely is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's incredible. But then when you try and make the case that oxytocin might be the cardioprotective hormone, then suddenly it's all starting to make sense. But I guess we have to look at things on an evolutionary or through an evolutionary lens, really, to try and figure this out right.

Like I said, why would evolution put these touch receptors on our back? Well, to promote social contact, you would think. It's nature rewarding you saying, yes, more of this, please. I will make you healthy. Keep doing that. Yeah. In fact, you know, the gene for oxytocin, the oxytocin receptor gene, actually,

it's one of the oldest in the human genome. It's about 500 million years old and four days. No, not four days. Yeah, it's about 500 million years old and four days i'm on four days yeah it's 500 about 500 crap joke apologies to the listeners i couldn't resist it but 500 million years old what that said that tells you is it's vital for the survival of all species i mean all warm-blooded species have an oxytocin or a oxytocin-similar system. In humans, it's integrated itself during those hundreds of millions of years into almost all important, meaningful systems in the body,

even the growth of heart muscle cells in children. If children are loved and cared for, then as well as that producing human growth hormone, it also produces oxytocin, which helps to facilitate the growth of heart muscle cells, neurons, kidney cells, liver cells neurons kidney cells liver cells skin cells and that's why children who are deprived of love and affection they have they end up i guess psychologists think they call it psychosocial dwarfism they end up a lot smaller than their genetic potential

because levels of growth hormone and oxytocin are suppressed through the lack of love and compassion and care absolutely and then there's the study with the Romanian orphanages where kids were fed and watered, but they didn't get touch. And the ones who didn't get any touch have got higher instances that are older, autoimmune problems, behavioural problems. And it all marries up that we're a social species. We are, you know, we've evolved to be connected to each other but now we're frankly more connected to our devices i know than we are to other humans um so if you show your

smartphone compassion and you touch your smartphone uh does it also release oxytocin well do you know i i you've made me think there i was i was joking but unless you're going to pull out a research study no i wasn't i was going to pull out the film cast away with tom hanks okay and i you know remember it was at wilson he called that was it a coconut or a football he called it wilson i have not seen it actually well cat years ago but gareth is videoing this in the background nodding his head seriously so so tom hanks cast away he was on a desert island for years and he made a connection. I'm sure it was an old burst football or a coconut or something, but he made it into something

that he bonded about and he spoke to it as if it was a person. He gave it a face and hair and he called it Wilson and he cared so much for it that one day when it got swept, you see, he was devastated. It was grief.

It was loss. And I think if you can bond, even with, you know, make a joke of it, hugging a tree, it doesn't i think if you can bond even with you know make a joke of it hugging a tree it doesn't matter if you can bond with even in that case an inanimate object doesn't matter it's as long as you feel i'm making light obviously you're not going to bond with a smartphone but in general if you can like a child bonding with a doll for example with a with a you know a teddy bear something that you feel you can bond with. It's that bonding itself that releases the oxygen.

So we're wired to bond and to connect. Yeah, I love that. And the idea of a child with their teddy, or even this film, an inanimate object. And again, what started out as a slight joke, actually, if you think about it, well, technically you probably could bond with your smartphone if you gave it that kind of deep love, care and affection.

But I guess we're not doing that, are we? That's the point. The idea of even saying that, most people laugh at that because we all use our smartphones. But let's say you were to paint a wee smiley face on it and maybe something happened to you that you know that the only thing you had was a smartphone you just made a connect maybe that that was your way of communicating with the world and you were all

alone all of a sudden you would have a connection with the smartphone that's different from just sitting on the tube and looking at your emails so i guess in some ways well in many ways yes we're talking about connection but we're talking also about intentional living and we're talking about being present and being mindful because that's really what that connection is isn't it if you're sort of building up that relationship with another person or another object or a teddy you're intentionally doing it maybe speaking to it before you go to bed you're and and as you said before it's about the feeling that changes inside you that actually leads to a lot of those biochemical changes. Absolutely, yeah. So it's, you know, I often suggest to people that make kindness a practice.

Practice thinking kind thoughts about people. You know, if you find yourself about to say something about someone, stop for a minute and even just make an attempt, you know, not going to do it all the time, but some of the times make an attempt to think, I wonder if that person's struggling in their life right now. I know I'm talking about their behavior yesterday, but I wonder if they're struggling right now. You never know. I wonder if that man or woman is a good parent. I wonder what their relationship was with their parents and just change the dialogue.

And what that does, it introduces empathy and it introduces a different way of thinking. And not always successful, but oftentimes it will make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person. I think if we develop little practices, then kindness becomes a habit so that it's the go-to, it's the first thought, is the compassionate thought, the kind thought.

And then the way in which you speak to to people the way in which you interact with people becomes gent more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit and that i think becomes your way and i'm speaking from experience here because i i have completely changed as a person in the and during the time that i've been really working on the mind-body connection, but particularly when I've been focused on kindness, I wasn't meaning as a horrible person, but relative, I have made large gains, I guess, in the quality of person that I've become. I become gentler, more compassionate, more kind. I cry a lot more. I don't know if that's related to it, but I'm much softer than I was maybe 10 years ago. And it's a consequence of my awareness

of what kindness and compassion is and what it does for us. Yeah, you can cultivate this as a feeling, as a practice. And I think for many of us, we sort of feel that I'm just not a kind person or that's not me and it almost feels a little bit forced

but I think you can force it a little bit and actually make it and turn it into your reality and it's something that I talk about on my kids loads is this idea of being kind and we play this gratitude game every dinner time that I've mentioned on this podcast before. So I don't need to mention the exact nature of that game again. But sometimes we do add on a question to say,

well, what have I done today? What kind thing have I done today? And we go around and we have to think about it. And we once did that for about three weeks every day wow and and you know I think initially it was a bit tricky it's oh I'm not sure I'm not sure you know it was a bit of resistance to it but after a while it's really started to embed in and I think the kids were super excited to tell mummy and daddy at the end of time what kind thing they did

today. And so it almost, I guess in some ways it's sort of playing back to what you were saying at the start, which we're going to explore is the power of our minds on our bodies. Like you can almost practice the kind of person you want to become and you can become it. Absolutely. I mean, it's like no one's ever become an olympic champion by going to the gym once or running around the block once it because it's a practice so anything that you do to to get better at is something that you practice so i think when you practice being kind that's a that's amazing game that you play with the kids have you actually out of interest have you noticed that as they you do that you play that game that they've become more likely to be

kind because they're looking for something to talk about 100 yeah it's amazing it's very hard you know it's not a scientific study where i can peel out every little component in it but something has changed yeah and um you know again for me you know i'd like to think i was a kind and compassionate person anyway but i think being aware of this and actually positively trying to cultivate that on my children is also upskilling me in that area as well um and i noticed that a lot in my interactions now on social media um and that you know even when someone which is very rare these days, but if someone's left a snidey comment or said something to attack me, you know, it doesn't really bother me anymore.

And I look at it with kindness and compassion. I think, oh, I wonder what's going on in your day. You've probably taken that out on me. That's, you know, in my head. And I really, it's, you know, there's a scientific argument to it. But even if there wasn't, it just feels like the right thing to do and it feels nicer and you sleep better and you don't get agitated as much exactly um i think that whole idea that that the kindness is the opposite of stress is it's a really beautiful concept um

what happens when we get angry like i mean i know from a stress perspective in terms of the stress hormones and i have seen um anger that we hold on to for years and resentment yeah yeah it is toxic it can absolutely raise your blood pressure and i've got a few patients of mine who i couldn't get their blood pressure down with medication with uh diets with lifestyle changes in a way that i would always you know i would always go for nutrition and lifestyle first until they started to let go of anger that they were holding on to um is that something you're familiar with yeah i mean i i think it's better to get out than in i mean some of these people say you shouldn't be angry but you need to get out there's got to

be some way of venting you know i'm not advocating you know you know being unkind to people what i what i mean is if you if you've got pent up and stored up anger it's better out there and in fact i read a a book recently called expressive writing by a professor called james penny baker and he pioneered a lot of the work on releasing anger and trauma in the body by simply spending 15 or 20 minutes a day writing continuously for that time on four consecutive days about your emotional trauma or something that happened and you basically outline what happened how you felt how it's affected your life kind of thing just some way just one that's basic structure to vent and sometimes you can

swear and you could anger but but the idea the act of expressing it gradually has an amazing effect because in one of the studies they they found that their immune response to an endotoxin was significantly higher than those who hadn't done the expressive writing so the immune system is becoming more robust as a consequence of expressive writing that's incredible and for people listening who are not familiar with what an endotoxin is um you know one way of describing it is that inside your gut um we've got lots of different bacteria you know trillions of bacteria and other organisms and you know we very simplistically consider them to be good and bad, which is far too simplistic. But essentially some of them,

those bacteria are called what we call gram negative. And on their coats, you've got something called lipopolysaccharide or LPS. It's a little sugar that basically is fine if it stays in your gut. But if it sort of goes through from the gut into your bloodstream that's where it can be pro-inflammatory and that's caused all kinds of problems in your brain and your joints with your blood sugar so that's what an endotoxin is and you know what you're saying there about how it can alter your immune response is pretty incredible just by doing expressive writing yeah they found a lot of other studies they even tracked students over the course of a year

and they tracked they had enough students to get a statistically significant result and tracked the number of of visits to the medical center and they found that those who did the expressive writing had significantly lower need to visit the medical centre I mean having just got anger and hurt and trauma out of their system you've got to process it in some way yeah and actually this whole British characteristic of stiff upper lip you know keep it inside I think it is incredibly problematic yeah because that anger that energy really has to go somewhere and we're seeing loads of good evidence now that it gets stored in your body and it can impact

muscle tightness and all kinds of things that people are trying to stretch out but actually often it's um unprocessed emotions that i've seen in my own life i've seen my own flexibility improved dramatically not by stretching every day but by releasing some emotions that i'd held on to which is simply incredible and all and you know because if we don't then you it's possible to start fitting the cardiovascular status i mean one one of the i guess one of my favorite titles of a study is called marital conflict relations and coronary artery calcification or CAC for short and I think you can work most people can work it with that means marital conflict relations and coronary artery calcification scientists took 150 married couples put them in a room one couple at

time asked them to discuss marital topics for for half an hour and they videotaped them and they scored displays, you know, language and displays of kindness and compassion and gentleness and patience. And they also scored anger and hostility and aggression and all these kind of things like that. So you've got a whole spectrum from the real far out hostile, aggressive and frequent expressions of anger to the other side, which was really people you could say were softer people, gentler, much more compassion and kindness and empathy and touch also. And one of the most amazing symmetries I've ever come across in science, when I say a symmetry,

you know, it's symmetrical one thing on the other. The group who had high levels of hostility, aggression and anger expressing, which you might say are hardened people, they had high levels of hardening of the arteries. And the group who were softer people, they had normal, what you would call soft arteries. When you controlled in the study for diet and exercise,

smoking, drinking, et cetera, the only difference really was how you behaved in that half an hour. And that was taken as a proxy for normal behavior. That half an hour slice was taken as a proxy for normal behavior that half an hour slice was taken as a proxy for this is probably how you are a large part of the time and so what you can see there is if we don't get out our system it can end up having serious negative consequences yeah and i think we all need to find ways to process those feelings that wind us up.

Anger, frustration, too much stress. You know, exercise can be a great way of burning it off and letting it go. Even I say to people, you know, if you don't have time, you know, do one minute of star jumps as hard as you can. You know, you literally are burning off. Absolutely. And that stress to a certain degree. Another tip that a friend of mine gave me, he uses it himself i have tried it a couple of times it's like if someone makes you mad or you get frustrated with something um write an email

back to them but don't press send yeah and i can't tell you it is it is incredibly beneficial because as as you've already demonstrated some of the the research you've cited, there's something about the act of not just keeping it going around your mind, going around your body. You are processing it in some way. You're writing it out. You're talking it out. And that is processing. Yeah. and that is processing yeah you know and it's we shouldn't underestimate how you know how valuable simple tools like this really are i know because you know one of the things i i've noticed is we

think of a feeling or emotion as just something in our minds but there's actually four components to it you can't really disentangle an emotion or a feeling from your brain chemistry and body chemistry you also can't disentangle it from your autonomic nervous system, nor can you disentangle a feeling from your muscles. I mean, you don't smile when you're happy because you remember to smile. It's a reflex reaction because the zygomaticus major muscle that pulls your lips into a smile is connected in some way to the, say, call them the happy centers of the brain. Similarly, when you feel stressed, you don't remember to tense your jaw and tense your neck.

It's a reflex reaction. So what happens is how we feel gets expressed on the muscles, but it goes the other way as well. You know, what you do with your body. One of the best ways I've ever found to reduce momentary feelings of stress is to move my body, get up.

Rather than sitting down and breathing softly i'll get up and move but an artificially slow pace and using this fact to emotion isn't just a feeling it's connected to your it's part of your how it shows up in your muscles if you move your body in an artificially slow way and even talk artificially slowly obviously if you're at a meeting you're not going to do that. But on your own, it's almost like your brain hears, I've got this, I must feel quite relaxed. And I think that works because,

you know, long before language, language is what, 15,000 years old, give or take a wee bit. But long before language, your ancestors communicated through body language and gesture. If they wanted to express themselves, they used their body to express.

So what happened is there became this really strong relationship between physical expression and how the person feels. So in that way, what you find is how you feel shows up in your muscles, but how you move your muscles and your body shows up in how you feel. And it's a two-way street. So you can use your body, like exercise movement, for example to to help change how you feel in the moment kind of thing you know i suppose a lot of um therapists recently who you know work on people's bodies whether it's a sports massage therapist um or whatever kind of therapist but they will tell you that you can feel or they can

feel particularly when they've been doing it for a period of years i said i can tell what's going on in that person's life i can feel how stressed they are from the tone of their muscles and how their body feels now look that's not my skill set so i can't but it's really interesting to hear that skill set so i can't but it's really interesting to hear that um yeah and i guess david you know as you're telling me you know the these stories and this research you know i keep thinking back to you as you say 20 years ago in the pharmaceutical industry and you know these things that we're talking about we often say are the softer characteristics of being a human, the softer sides to medicine or whatever. In some ways, we're being a little bit derogatory about them, almost as if we feel a need to soften it, quite literally. Whereas it's not quite as robust as what's the oxygen level of the blood as it pumps out of the heart.

Or is it? Because is it just a perception? Because you're a scientist by training. You're a scientist by degree. You've got a PhD in organic chemistry. This is pretty hardcore. You know, this is pretty hardcore, yet you are now talking with confidence, with knowledge about the science of kindness, of compassion, of touch, of visualisation. You know, what do your former colleagues think of what you're doing now?

Do they know? Are you still in touch with them? I'm in touch with a couple of them who are actually greatly supportive you know because i i find even when i worked in the pharmaceutical industry it wasn't that people were so skeptical about things they just didn't know most of the stuff i talk about they just didn't know and it's not like i think we we often have this perception if someone is educated in a particular way then they must know everything about everything and it's you know many many people are specialized in their own particular field and i i learned when i was there that nobody had any idea about the placebo effect despite the fact we see it in the

data the drug trial data every day but no one actually knew anything about it so the colleagues i'm still in touch i think some of them probably think it's a bit kind of woo-woo but most of them that i'm that i've been in touch with over the years are greatly supportive in fact they're so fascinated by it isn't this amazing i had no idea for example that you know if you like you mentioned visualization that if you visualize moving your body then in some ways your brain processes that as if you're actually doing it i remember telling one of my former colleagues that i go what really so i go the brain scans and showed him he's like whoa amazing and it's not that you know i think skepticism is sometimes a product of just not knowing yeah it just doesn't sound possible it's not that you know it just

doesn't sound because i've never heard anything it's not within your frame of reference it's not around the education model which you've been taught it never came into that exactly so therefore there probably is a natural skepticism yeah um but as you say the way to change that is to give them the science in a way that they already understand it and go hey look did you know that and i i agree most people would be like, oh, that is so interesting. There's a lot of research on that, isn't there? About, well, yes, how influential our minds are over our bodies. But I think I've written one of your blog posts on your website about,

I think it's a research paper about if you imagined flexing your finger, right? For 15 minutes a day. for what three months was it three months yeah yeah what happened yeah so so what happened just just to go back a step yeah back up sure so a professor at harvard very famous neurologist called alvaro pascal leone did a study where he got volunteers to play a sequence of five notes on a piano so they basically put the hands flat on a table and went plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk with each with a thumb index finger middle finger ring finger pinky finger up and down a scale for two hours

on five consecutive days now that it's not fully two hours that's tiring you might do like a minute of plunk plunk plunk then a couple of minutes rest a minute a couple of minutes rest but for two hours they had their brains scanned every day on the region connected to the finger muscles and it underwent significant change. We now call that neuroplasticity. So it massively changed and inside by about 30 to 40 times. That's fair enough.

It's what you now expect from repetition of movement. But while they were doing that, a separate group of people put their hands flat on the table, closed their eyes and imagined that they were playing the five notes. No movement. It's called kinesthetic imagery. And what that means is you imagine how it feels as if you were really doing it. You're not necessarily seeing it. You could see it if you want. But the key is to imagine the feelings as if you really are moving your finger muscles, but you're not. They had their brain scanned every day. And their same region of their brain had also changed by 30 to 40 times. And if you put the brain scan side by side, you cannot tell the difference between those who played the notes with their fingers, those who played the notes in their mind. So that's given birth to a lot of research, including the little finger research. I think that was done at the cleveland and the cleveland institute in the states and what they did got volunteers to do 15 extensions

and contractions you know scientists have to really nail they tell you exactly it's like extend the little finger 15 times and contract it extend it contract it 15 times 20 seconds rest 15 times 20 seconds rest 15 times 20 seconds like 15 reps at a time for quarter of an hour for three months and they got 53 percent stronger while they were doing that a separate group of people closed their eyes hands flat on the table in kinesthetic imagery they imagined they were doing the 15 extensions and contractions but no movement at all they got 35 percent stronger because this was at the start and the end of the study, they put their finger in a machine and lifted a

set of weights up to see how strong they were. So by just imagining that you'd moved your finger, they'd got 35% stronger versus 53%. Now someone's sceptical. When I first talked about this, it wasn't 53% like those moving the finger, but it also wasn't zero. Here is 35% improvement in strength from doing nothing at all other than imagining the feelings as if you really were moving your fingers. Yeah, it's just incredible. And then it makes me think of

the untapped potential we all have within us that we're looking at a particular component of health, let's say. You know, one thing I try and do on this podcast is to broaden out that conversation around how to say there are so many different factors that play a role. But what you're saying, David, really really is really very profound for a lot of people that our minds how we visualize things they can absolutely play a difference in our body absolutely and you know it's incredible the idea that visualization works so because i i i wasn't familiar with some of that research um but i've always done it myself. I've always talked about it with my patients.

And I've always said, look, if the top athletes in the world visualize so that they can have peak performance in their chosen activity or their race, well, you kind of want peak performance in your own life. Absolutely. Right. Whatever that means to you. So why would you not use that tool? Oh, it's good enough for Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps, but it's not good enough for me. It doesn't really make any sense, does it? I know that many pro golfers visualize the night before they play, they literally are visualizing being on the tee the exact shot

shape they want their ball to make what their club they're going to play next they're going to visualize it all the way until it goes in i remember reading stuff like this a while ago and when i did get into golf a few years back um i would often do that on a friday night before my rounds i would actually visualize and you know what it makes a difference and and I think this then plays into this whole idea that can the brain tell the difference between vivid imagery and reality and it doesn't seem to and in fact there's there's a number of related studies in almost different fields that tell you that I mean for example it's more obvious if you think of stress. Your brain doesn't really know the difference between whether you're in a stressful situation

or whether you're thinking about it, anticipating it or remembering it. Similarly, your brain produces, you still produce the kindness hormone, oxytocin, whether you're being kind, watching it, or even closing your eyes and thinking about it and feeling the same feelings you don't have to be there with movement in fact you talk all the all the top sports people even there's even studies on rehabilitation from stroke and there's even been a meta-analysis recently

gold standard statistical analysis that looked at all the studies of stroke and they found typically people have had a stroke would do six weeks of physiotherapy sessions but in these studies and it wasn't people who just had a stroke one study one of the patients 14 years ago and everyone does physiotherapy but half of them in addition to the physiotherapy at the end of their session they do 30 minutes or so of visualization where they have to visualize repetitively movements that they are familiar with so imagine reaching for a glass of water taking a drink putting it back down imagine reaching drinking repetitively and in all of the studies those who do visualization on top of

physiotherapy recover much faster and much more in that six-week period than those who just do a physiotherapy alone so there's a number of different ways the brain isn't distinguishing. Even eating was studied by a professor called Kerry Morwedge, found that looking at the way that the brain suppresses appetite, I think it's leptin it produces, isn't it? Yeah.

That brain suppresses appetite when you've eaten a certain amount. And they found that if a person was just imagining eating, so they got people to imagine eating lots of sweets or lots of cubes of cheese versus just a little amount of sweets or a little amount of cubes of cheese.

And they found that the more the person imagined eating, the more it activated the I'm full part of the brain and their appetite was suppressed. And in the paper, they reported that the difference between real and imaginary, even when it comes to eating, seems to be a bit kind of blurry. So that could almost be a strategy for people who struggle with food cravings, I'm guessing. But you know, certainly it's worth trying.

Like, what happens if you've got a craving for that chocolate, and you think about it, and you imagine it on your tongue and that you're eating it and you imagine it sort of going down your esophagus into your tummy and that warm feeling look i've not tried that with patients as a strategy but why not yeah and what's the downside right i'm wondering because i've thought of this i've thought quite a lot about this and i'm wondering because the body responds to vivid imagery and I'm I'm I don't know the answer to this but I wonder if imagining eating chocolate will affect blood sugar I don't know I really don't know wouldn't that be fascinating it would be fascinating to test it

it might be better not so much for food cravings but if you for losing weight imagine eating your dinner before you eat it and then imagine eating something healthy and at least maybe produce something healthy, but at least it'll suppress your appetite. So you might find yourself eating less. I don't know the answer, but I've thought about it a little bit. It really is super, super interesting. I'm just taking a quick break in the conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Vivo Barefoot are a minimalist footwear company that I am a huge fan of. I myself have been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for years, as have my entire family. They make really comfortable minimalist shoes for adults and for children that are perfect to live your entire life in. Many of us at the

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If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA and Australia. And importantly, they offer a 100 day trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20 20 off code by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more you know you mentioned at the start that you came down from dunblane and you sort of gave a little hint there that you took up tennis because everyone around you's playing tennis yeah and so you've taken up in your 40s and you thought you weren't very good but now you're playing through the leagues and you mentioned visualization and then I clocked that I thought

okay well what's going on there so David tell us how you're going to be playing at Wimbledon next year yeah well I might I might go the year after but now here's the thing and take us back to when you started and what happened when you started, just take us through that journey. So I started playing tennis. In Dunblane, most people in the leagues have been playing since their children, very latest since their teenagers. Very unusual for someone to start playing for the first time in their mid-40s.

So I started to really enjoy it because I realised it was quite scientific. The coach would, every Wednesday night there's coaching and the coach would say, this is how you hold the racket and if you turn it at an angle and lift the racket from low and move it to high you put topspin on the ball and it keeps it in the court and I thought this is quite scientific

so I thought this is great fun I was very resistant to playing tennis but thought I'm going to do this, so I joined the league systems and for two years I was officially the second worst tennis player in Dunblane officially and and I say second worst there's like three or four league seasons per year the last a couple of months I think there's four a year we do in the last a couple of months and at the bottom

there's usually me second bottom for two years so it was like eight league eight box league seasons right the bottom second bottom and the only reason I wasn't bottom is because you get a point for showing up. So it's not like football and the premiership where you get three points for a win, one point for a draw, nothing for a loss. In Dunblane box leagues, to encourage you to play, you get one point for showing

up, four points for a win, etc. So I always got six points for playing six matches because it's four leagues of seven players. So anyway, so for two years, my average losing margin was six love, six won. I hadn't won a single set of tennis in two years in the box leagues. And I was getting a bit demoralized and I thought, you know, I've helped to coach people, athletes, golfers, you know, from time to time explained how visualizations works, how you would apply it to your life, etc. I've, you know, from time to time explained how visualizations works, how you

would apply it to your life, et cetera. I thought, why don't I try this? So it was exactly four weeks to the next box league season. And I thought, I'm going to science this up. I'm going to do it. So I decided I would pick the serve and I'd pick them one of the most difficult serves. You know, in all of sports, the tennis serve is the second most complex move in all of sports. Most people think it's, you know, surely not. The number one is the pole vault.

The reason why it's so complex is because most people think you just hit the ball with a flat racket, but in actual fact, a pro will turn the racket side on and face the opposite way and rotate their body and sweep the racket at an angle

over or up through the ball, depending on what kind of serve they want. And there's a serve called the kick serve that's very, very difficult. And I thought, I'm going to visualize. So I decided I'd visualize 10 serves to one side and 10 serves to the other side every day. Within two days of visualization, I couldn't do it. It was so difficult. And the reason why is because you need to have what's

called a mental representation you need to know what you're imagining it's okay when i talked about the study with stroke they they were using imagining things that they were familiar with like reaching for a glass of water in fact you've never done a tennis serve you can't visualize it correctly so i used a little trick of neuroscience called action observation in many ways not only can your brain not distinguish between whether you're doing something or imagining it your brain can't really distinguish much between whether you're doing something imagining or watching someone else doing it providing you watch repetitively it's called action observation gets a lot of research now in sports science so I obtained a video from Andy of Andy Murray doing serving. I cut it down to about five seconds

and I watched it 3,000 times. That's how we activate action observation. Not in one go. I printed out a little table in Microsoft Word. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, week one, week two, week three, week four. So I had roughly 30 days to do this. So I watched it 100 times a day for 30 days just on replay.

And that's just conditioning the brain circuits as if you're visualizing and then after a couple of days my mental representation was absolutely crystal clear I could see a professional kick serve crystal clarity in my mind so then after the second or third day 10 visualizations of hitting the serve to one side 10 to the other once a week I went down to the court, hit a few balls. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I won the league. I went from having never won a set to winning the division. Then I won the next division without dropping a set.

So then I was up to the second division and all that. So I went from the fourth to the third to the second. That's when you're getting into the really much tougher players who've been playing literally since childhood. And I'm not trying to impress anyone but just to impress upon you that my improvement was in large part related to the volume of visualization the fact that I'd used this visualization of a particular shot repetitively yeah I mean just so incredible look I'm trying to think about the listener who is thinking okay I don't want to be a sportsman. I'm no interest in tennis. I don't know, but they might be nervous about public speaking and they've got to present someone next week or in front of their

colleagues. So, can we say that if they are scared of public speaking, for a week leading up to the event, they can every evening in bed or just sitting down in a quiet space, visualize walking onto that stage, what it feels like, who is in the audience, what the, I don't know, what the smell will be like.

I don't know. Is this something that we can all use in our own lives for whatever we want to achieve? Exactly. In fact, you hit the nail on the head there because the way to do it, the way to apply this to say public speaking, if you have a fear of that,

or even if there's someone you feel nervous around, for example, is you visualize from that moment, let's say you're getting up from the stage, your name's called and what you're visualizing, you've got to pay attention to, as you're imagining, pay attention to how your shoulders feel, pay attention to your gait, how fast you're walking, pay attention to your facial muscles. And what you're actually doing is you've got to visualise the movement of your body, because that's what the brain wires in. The brain will wire that repetitive movement of the body as if you're really doing it so you're not many people think if you want to visualize public

speaking just they go right to the end and see a standing ovation but in actual fact what I'm suggesting is you visualize the your physical body the way you would move your body if you feel I've got this I've got something I can't wait to tell them I'm feeling relaxed, I'm feeling confident and so visualize the entire movement of your body how you hold and move your body as you get to the stage and then visualize the first opening two or three lines so you're literally paying attention to your body similarly if you're visualizing

you know let's say someone who makes you feel nervous maybe it's your boss at work or something then normally what you would do is your body would tense up and your speech would be affected. So visualize moving up towards your boss, your supervisor, and visualize your body being relaxed, your spine being straight, your shoulders relaxed, your head up, visualize your rate of breathing, paying attention to your physical organism, how you hold and move your body. And that's what the brain wires in as if you're really doing it so if you do that for a week leading up to the presentation or the meeting with the boss

then you'll find your brain will have wired enough that that might go into default it might go into an automatic or certainly it would be easier yeah to be like that than had you not done the visualization yeah i think for me there's probably an added bonus there, which is apart from your brain now being there. And by the time you rock up to that event, your brain feels I've been here before. I think it has another purpose, which is you are proactively doing something to prepare. You're not stressing and worrying and getting anxious. You're going, okay, cool. That's going to be nerve wracking,

but I can do something each day now that's going to get me stronger for that event. Yeah, it's an amazing feeling because I think many people in society do feel disempowered. Like, you know, we don't know what to do to improve ourselves. And I think just giving that little bit, it gives you confidence, it boosts your self-esteem. And you suddenly feel, I'm in control,

or I am controlling more of this than I ever thought. I am this kind of person that can do that. And it does wonders for your identity, your self-esteem. And it's a happiness tool as well, but it gives you more energy, psychological energy. Just, I can do this. Yeah, for sure. I am this person.

So David, you've written about the five side effects of kindness, right? Which I think is a lovely, lovely idea, particularly with someone with a background in the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to turn around side effect. Yeah, because a side effect isn't just a negative side effect of a drug.

It's anything that happens alongside the thing that you're intending to do yeah i guess you know anything we do in life has a consequence any drug you take has a consequence that all effects i guess if it's the effect we want we call it the therapeutic effect if it's the effect we don't want it's a side effect right so i guess it's it's it's just how we phrase these things um but let's go into i think it's an interesting idea so what are the five side effects of kindness so number one kindness makes you happier number two kindness is good for the heart number three kindness slows aging number four kindness improves relationships and number five kindness is contagious there you go five side effects of kindness i love that and there's science behind all of that absolutely

behind all of it in fact the happiness stuff has been well studied typically what you do is you compare people intentionally doing acts of kindness versus people in a control group who not do who are just behaving as normal and you can track the happiness levels before and after. And you can do it a number of different ways. But in almost all of those studies, you see net gains in happiness or people who do more kindness generally tend to be typically happier. So what you see is kindness actually improves happiness. Another thing it does is it reduces stress at the same time that the heart stuff is principally through the action of the kindness hormone

through being kind if it produces a sense of warmth and connection what i what i did with that chapter is i just tracked the different physical effects in the heart and the cardiovascular system and you know even to do with inflammation and oxidative stress as you practice kindness because of how it makes you feel the the slowing aging stuff is interesting because there's a number of processes of aging a number of different ways that aging occurs but one of them is is something called oxidative stress or production of free radicals and one study i cited when scientists was look we're looking at the rate of of oxidative stress in skin cells and they found that if you introduce the kindness hormone to the skin cells put under stress the levels of

oxidative stress was substantially less and there's similar research looking at how the kindness hormone i'll call it the kindness i love it i love it, how it has quite a substantial body-wide effect on oxidative stress, which is one of the processes of aging. It's just one of a number. I mean, kindness reducing the aging process, that is profound. And I love the fact that you call it the kindness hormone, oxytocin, which is also called the cuddle hormone or the cuddle chemical. The hug drug. The hug drug. But you know, in many ways, it's all kind of pointing to the same conclusion, which is when we are around other people who support us and we support them when we're in our tribe basically we feel good our body changes our genetic expression changes we reduce things like inflammation and oxidative stress and immune

dysfunction these things which actually those three things probably drive most chronic diseases at their core inflammation oxidative stress and immune dysfunction and we're saying that simply being around people we love uh who who are empathetic who are kind who are compassionate it has profound impacts on all those things it's incredible i mean it really it really is incredible in fact can i suggest another aging study recently scientists were tracking a tibetan buddhist practice called the loving kindness meditation oh yeah you basically say you think of people you care about in your life and other people anyone in your life and you say things like in your mind may you be happy may you be well may you be safe may you be at peace or something a lot there's different versions but so may you be happy may you be well may you be safe may you be at peace and it's repetition of that for yourself loved ones even difficult people all

life and it's a repetition and and it's been known for a while that that generates a system-wide anti-inflammatory effect it it impacts part of the nervous system that controls something called the inflammatory reflex so So basically it improves what's called vagal tone, which is like muscle tone, but talking about a part of your nervous system that impacts on inflammation. And they found that practice caused a reduction in the inflammatory response to stress. But a recent study looked at the rate of biological aging by measuring the length of telomeres. Yeah. You know, so telomeres, you probably explained before, the aglet, little plastic shoelace caps called aglets.

And the rate of loss of telomeres is proportional to the rate in which the person is aging at that time. And so they compared a control group with a group doing mindfulness meditation with a group doing, may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace, or a version of the loving kindness meditation. And they found they measured the length of loss of telomere after six weeks of normal, just no practice at all. And that's your baseline. And then they measured mindfulness meditation. They found a little slowing of the loss, but they found no measurable loss at all in that six week period of those who did the loving kindness. They may be happy, may be... And it seems to be that a possible explanation

is an anti-inflammatory effect in the vicinity of the telomeres, which you might think of as a decluttering of the environment around the DNA, which allows it to repair itself better. I mean, it is just incredible. And it puts a huge smile on my face hearing things like this, because it's just a nice thing to hear, right? It's great when the things that make us feel good as human beings also do good for us, right? That's kind of win-win all around. You said that kindness is contagious. Yeah.

Can you explain? Oh, no. This is actually what, this is, I was going to say this is my favourite, but I've got so many favourites that I get carried away sometimes. You sound like me. I'm the same. This is why this conversation could keep going on and on unless we start thinking about wrapping it at some point,

but fire away. So a study between Harvard and Yale, they did a clever little business game simulation. A lot of these studies are done in little simulations. You create a game and what you're secretly measuring is kindness or cooperative behavior. And what they found is if you be kind to someone, then because of how that person feels, they call it elevation, that person feels either connected to you or they feel uplifted or they feel

grateful. It doesn't really matter. It's a feeling, a changed feeling that person will likely be kind or kinder to someone else because of how you made them feel now that person now is at one social step from your one degree of separation but that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how they were made to feel that's at two degrees of separation but then that person will be kind or kinder to someone else at three degrees of separation or three social stops but that isn't real practice because in reality given the average amount of interconnectedness of interactions that we have in any one day you might well probably say that if you be kind to someone if you if you were to follow them around which hopefully you don't do

but we don't do but if you were to follow a person around with a camera, you would probably find that the person you've just helped will be kind or kinder to five people over the course of the rest of the day because of how you made them feel, given the average amount of interconnection. But those five people will be kind or kinder to five more. And now we're at two so-so steps, 25 people.

But each of those five people will be kind or kinder to five more. And now we're at two social steps, 25 people. But each of those five people will be kind or kinder to five further people, which is 125 at three social steps. You really have this ripple effect, just like you drop a pebble in a pond and the wave goes out in all directions. And a lily pad at the opposite side of the pond goes up and down.

And it doesn't know why it's going up and down, but it's going up and down because of the wave. But the same is happening to lily pads at the other side of the pond the wave goes out in all directions so what this research shows is that kindness spreads out in all directions so it's not just one person that you help but it ripples out in all directions and if you were to track it that way you you would probably find somewhere, given the average amount of social interaction most people have, you probably find around about 125 people, probably more given a densely populated area,

are benefiting from every single time you do, even say something nice, you pay a compliment, you help someone, you hold a door for someone. It sounds so, you know, preposterous so simple but i i put it to the listeners that if you ever feel small if you ever feel that you don't contribute

you don't make a difference you're doing it every single day even with the little things that you don't think matter but they matter to the person that you've helped who will then spread it out by to three social steps yeah david i i mean i absolutely love things like this um it it makes me think of in this in this time where many of us feel powerless to make a change and we don't like the way society is heading it reminds me of that phrase is i don't know if it's i can't remember who is um be the change you want to see in the world. This is putting it right back in our own court saying, hey, you know what? Be kind to someone each day and that will ripple out. That is something we can all do. And, you know, we say it's for that other person, even if it doesn't make us feel good, but the reality is it does make us feel good. You know, compare the

difference when you go into a coffee shop and order your coffee and take it and go on with your day compared to when you actually take it. Say something nice to the person, to the barista. Hey, thanks so much. Really appreciate that. Hey, you made me a great one yesterday. I hope this one's as good. You know, anyway, have a good day. Whatever it is, they've got a smile on their face. they they have probably been sort of shocked out of the maybe the tedium that they were feeling trying to make you know 100 coffees in an hour but you feel good as well and that does in your own life spread to your to you know to your other interactions but it reminds me a bit of um what's something andy ramage said to me i had him on

i think in november he was um he set up this thing at this company uh one year no beer oh yeah yeah it was a really fun podcast i had with him actually great conversation and he he was citing some of the research i think it's from nicholas christakis that i'm familiar with about the power of social networks and how even something like obesity can spread through social networks. It goes to three degrees of separation. Exactly. So the point is, everything you're sort of saying, and we've been discussing today, is about community. It's about strong human connections.

It's about how you treat those people around you can ripple into so many more people. And I think that's a very inspiring and empowering message for all of us, no matter, you know, where we are in life or what we're trying to achieve. Yeah, absolutely. I think it really all comes down to, I've said this many times, it really all comes down to kind interactions. You know, what's the point in not being kind? Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a really silly thing to say,

but I try to see the world that way. I don't always succeed. I think we're only human. We're just trying to do the best we can. But I think if we make an effort to be a kind person, a decent person, it makes you feel better. It makes that person feel better. And it just strengthens social bonds.

And then you think, you find that communities just seem to work a little feel better. It makes that person feel better. And it just strengthens social bonds. And then you think, you find that communities just seem to work a little bit better. People tend to work a little bit better. Groups work a little bit better when we're making an effort to be kind. And it diffuses situations, I've realised. You know, if you're really kind to someone, it's pretty hard for them to start, you know,

either getting angry and resentful at you it's it's it really we respond to the signals we're getting in the environment around us right we respond even things are going on physiologically we don't even realize and so i think the way you treat other people is really gets reflected back on yourself so so much david you say you spend a lot of time teaching these days um who do you teach and what do people say at the end of some of your courses a very a very mixture mostly general public a oftentimes i mean professional people you know in the nhs will come along to some but i've spoken to nhs a couple of times i do corporate speaking i talk to different companies and the what i tend to talk to them about is kindness is the opposite nhs will come along to something i've spoken to nhs a couple of times i do corporate speaking i

talk to different companies and the what i tend to talk to them about is kindness is the opposite of stress and here's why and here's how you give a little tools at conferences workshops i mean last night i did a lecture in glasgow on the mind body connection and just get you know a couple hundred people come along and and i do like a 90 minutes so i do quite a lot of that 90 minutes just giving a talk and try to make it entertaining people there for 90 minutes i've got to throw in a few jokes here and there but so i do a lot of that kind so it's different kind of audiences but it's really people who have an interest in learning about the mind body connection or learning about how kindness isn't good for your health and can make a difference in the world yeah i guess i can see the value for adults i can see the value for everyone frankly i can also really see value for children and if we instill this in our kids in society and they

grow up knowing the importance of it experiencing the importance of it, doing it and practicing it regularly, you just can fast forward that five, 10 years into society, what then happens to society. And, you know, I guess in a couple of weeks, I'm actually giving a talk at my children's school for mental health week there. And it's going to be around the feel better in five plan, because I think that five minutes on your mind, five minutes on your body, five minutes on your heart each day, I think it's the perfect wellbeing plan for any one of us,

but particularly for children, you know, in schools, you know, they want to, they want to introduce wellbeing into schools, but everything either costs too much or takes too long. You know,

everything in that is only takes five minutes and it's free. And I haven't started to think about it yet i think the talk's in about 10 days but i need to talk for about half an hour to kids and make it engaging for kids between the ages 6 and 11 and obviously i won't talk about all kinds of things with them but i think kindness uh there are a couple of kindness practices in the in the plan um but certainly on the back of this conversation as well i really feel that that might be a nice thing to talk about have you spoken about it much with kids yeah i actually about a dozen times i've gone into schools usually kind of local like like one of my friends is a teacher in an autism specialist unit near Glasgow and I've been into his school about four times I think and then I did one of the couple one of the local schools in Dunblane where I live I did another couple of schools my niece's school and but each time I've gone in

I did one at mental health week actually for mental health week for another school kind of local and usually the kids kids are about to start or they're in the middle of a kindness project where the teachers have designed a little thing where they have to learn about kindness. They have to be kind, to understand what kindness is. And so they've got little things up in the board, little pictures that they've drawn about what they've done.

And so the whole project is to learn about what kindness is and how do you do it but notice how it makes you feel and notice how it affects that other person's behavior and then depending on the age of the kid understanding a little bit more about it and and so i tend to come in because it's just novel having someone else and i bring in my books and i bring in all the international translations like the Japanese version, the Romanian version, the French and the Italian version. And the kids just love having something to pass around while I talk about kindness because they all want to know. You'll find this yourself.

They want to know about you as well. I mean, the first time I did it, open for questions, expecting a question about kindness. What age are you? Next question, what colour is your car? You know, but it's just so nice that the kids just want to know about you. They're being kind already

because they want to know about you as well as about the kindness of the stuff. So I've really enjoyed doing it. I mean, these are great tips and I'm already thinking about how to apply them. know some of those things i always think you can learn from everyone you come into in contact with you there's always a learning there and even that idea of giving stuff out where they're almost getting excited and wanting to engage with you i find that interesting i'll probably think about what i can do about that um any particular

stories you've heard from kids or stories that you've said that they really resonate with? Yeah, about kindness. What I've found really inspiring is, particularly when I went into one of the autism unit, because John, my friend John, has been really pushing kindness. I've got me on the wall actually as Dr. Kindness.

I love it. Pushing kindness. Isn't that a lovely thing to be pushing in society? You're a kindness pusher. Yeah, and it's really lovely. You know, I feel part of the furniture when I've gone in. But every time I go in, when the kids see me coming, someone goes and opens the door

and then they're telling me what they've done, what they've been doing. And you hear things like, well, I've held a door. One person're telling me what they've done what they've been doing and you hear things like well I've held a door one person really inspired me said I decided when such and such a boy was was not being very mean I decided not to push him down and and that was a girl who who was known for pushing people down and and it was such a beautiful thing that she stopped for a moment and decided to be kind and said but she was totally aware that that's what she did and I felt myself getting quite moved but what you might think is a simple little most people wouldn't even notice it but I know that she pushed people in

the past and she decided to stop and understood that being kind is not responding in that way and I thought that's just it really melted me, actually. Do you make a point with kids of teaching them that, yes, it's a nice thing to do for that other person, but it's also good for you? Yeah. Because I think that's going to be a message that resonates with the kids. Absolutely.

And frankly, adults, because we're just big kids, right? That if you don't want to do it because it's good for other people, do it because it's good for other people do it because it's good for yourself i know an actual fact that that's a that's been a big part of all of the kindness projects that i've went into the school to talk during that kindness week for example a big part of it pushed by that you know pushed along by the staff is how it makes you feel and the importance of also being kind to yourself i'm not trying to plug my books in but lady gaga bought one of my books and and she bought it for all of her staff and it was one of my kindness books and her mum and her office reached that charity born this way foundation reached out to me and and we had a few conversations cynthia

her mum cynthia gemini and i did a few we entered couple of wee interviews and I went over to the US to New York last year and they'd invited me to participate in a kindness project and one of the things Born This Way Foundation does is they go into schools and they help children to understand what kindness is

and so I went over there and what happened is the kids at this school in Long Island had it's coming up to Christmas time they'd used some of their own Christmas allowance to buy presents for the children of women staying in a temporary homeless shelter so these kids wouldn't get presents otherwise and all these kids at the school had used their own allowance they said to their parents you know, can we take some of my allowance and could I buy this fire truck for such

or this game of something for such and such. And when we arrived at the school, Cynthia and I and some of the team, the whole corridor was filled with hundreds of presents. Then the kids took the presents one at a time and they took them in and they filled an entire yellow school bus with all these presents and then

the presents were driven away now part of the project was now what happens next the kid part of the project now was the kids were had to learn and discuss maybe the write-down or the debate but they have to learn about the consequences of what they've done the difference that that makes in the lives of these children who maybe wouldn't have got presents who are the children of women in homeless shelters but also to notice how did you feel when you did that and how did you feel when you learned that that makes a difference for them. So part of what they do is get involved

in these kind of projects that are really taking it right into children's hearts and minds so that they understand not just academically what kindness is, but how does it make you feel and notice that. And I think that it makes a huge difference to the kind of person that you become because you start to notice this feels a lot better than arguing on twitter for example yeah i mean i really like that particularly that idea of noticing how you feel um so i know i mentioned that gratitude uh practice earlier on in the episode

um that i didn't go and expand upon but let me just tell you what that what that what that game looks like because the podcast has got a lot of new listeners a lot of people won't be familiar with it but essentially for a number of years now at our evening dinner in the chastity households um my wife myself and my two kids um sit, we have dinner. And at some point during dinner, we play this gratitude game where we all have to answer three questions. What have I done today to make somebody else happy? What has somebody else done to make me happy? And what have I learned today? Now, what's incredible is that it's changed the dynamic of our mealtimes. It's changed the energy. People come in really stressed or rushing around.

You know, suddenly the dynamic just changes. You start to connect. You start to find out things about your family members and your kids and your wife that you wouldn't otherwise have learned if it wasn't in that setting. But what's really interesting is, you know, my kids are seven and nine now. So I'm guessing we started playing, I don't know, five and three or six and four, something like that. I can't quite remember now.

But my kids have started to bring in their own questions. So there's now five questions in the game. We don't always play all five. It depends how tired and frazzled everyone is, but we definitely do at least three. But one of the questions that I can't remember if it was my son or my daughter who brought in was, I think it was my daughter actually.

She said, she says, Daddy, why don't we add another question? So when you did something to make someone else happy, how did you feel? Right? So the fourth question is, it's going back to the first question and it came from my kids. Wow.

How do you feel? Wow. And just what you said there, noticing how you feel when you do an act of kindness, that's almost, and I think that's a really important part to sort of lock in that emotion. Lock it in. I like that, lock it in. Lock in that feeling.

Yeah. And just sort of luxuriate in that feeling. Oh, you know, I felt it made me feel good when I held the door open for my classmate. You know, whatever it is. And I think that's a really, really important component to anything in life, frankly, but particularly these sort of things.

You know, what you're doing for your children is altering the course of their life in a really positive way. I wish that I'd learned about kindness the way that what you're doing and the way that some schools are doing it. I wish our school had, for example, done a kindness project instead of us learning it later i think what you're doing now for your kids will shape positively shape the course of their life because it's conditioning it's locking that feeling in and it's conditioning the quality of person of people that they will become as they get older that will have an amazing impact on their health but also in the quality of the relationships and what they end up doing in the world and you know it's such a beautiful thing to teach your kids about being kind but locking in how it makes you feel because then it becomes I understand this because I feel it

yeah I'm not just something you're saying you do this you do that I get this because this is how I feel it's not it's not just something that daddy told me to do I feel it I've locked it in I feel it I feel it here wow amazing what a teaching for your children yeah well David I really appreciate you saying that because um I think like all parents I'm just simply trying to do the best I can for them based upon my knowledge and my experience well david look i have absolutely loved chatting with you today um you've written a lot of books if you were going to direct people listen to this to one book to get going on their david hamilton journey uh what do you think is the best starting point for them well possibly the five side effects of kindness. Yeah. Simply because you mentioned that, you know,

that it's a good starting point, but also how your mind can heal your body is that one all about the mind-body connection. I cover a few different subjects. Yeah. Oh, we'll link to all the eBooks in the show next session. I'll also link to some really, really good blogs on David's website that are well worth reading.

They're short. They won't take you long. So do check out the show notes page for this episode to, to, to sort of have access to those. David, this podcast is called feel better, live more.

When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. And you're very clearly saying that when we're kinder to other people, when we're moreer to other people, when we're more compassionate to other people, we and they get more out of their lives. And my goal with this podcast is to inspire each and every listener to take action, to do something, not just hear all this great information and go, hey, that's pretty cool. But actually turn that inspiration into action. So I wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your very top tips, things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately. How about why I often find people enjoy is the seven day kindness challenge. And you've got to do an act of kindness every day for seven days, but there's three ground

rules the first one is you can't count the same thing twice so for example if you start on a monday and you make someone a breakfast in bed or a cup of tea or something you can do that again during the week but it only counts the first time so you can't count it the other day so you've got to do seven different things another ground rule is at least once, you've got to push yourself a little bit, push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. And the number three is at least one of those acts of kindness must be completely anonymous. No one must ever know what you did or if something was done, no one must ever know that it was you that did it. And that takes yourself or the need for recognition out of the equation so that's

the ground rule so seven day kindness challenge something different every day push yourself out of comfort zone at least once and one thing has to be completely anonymous man i i literally love that so much i think what we'll do is our podcast episodes go out wednesday 1 p.m and so we'll do is our podcast episodes go out Wednesday 1pm. And so we'll put it out. And then I think on the Monday after, I'll probably launch on my social media channels a seven-day kindness challenge along with you and see if we can put some of that into practice and inspire lots of people to get going with that.

And then that can spread to their networks and their networks. Three degrees of separation. Yeah, so let's start a kindness revolution together that'd be amazing eh yeah we'll do that we'll do that definitely let's do it David look

really I have so enjoyed this conversation me too if people want to catch up with you on social media where can they find you? I'm on Instagram David R Hamilton PhD probably quite a mouthful to remember similar same handle on Facebook as well.

My website is drdavidhamilton.com. Fantastic. We'll link to everything in the show notes section. David, look, looking forward to seeing you at Life Lessons tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining me. And I think the best way to sign this episode off is may you be happy, may you be well,

may you be safe, may you have peace. Fantastic. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I hope that conversation provided a little bit of respite and escapism, but also a little bit of positivity in terms of something that we can all do that will really, really make a difference. Being kind is not just good for other people. It's also good for ourselves. Now, if you don't already follow me on social media, now might be a good time to start. On the Monday after this podcast launches, I am going to be doing the seven-day kindness challenge with my entire communities on Facebook

and Instagram. The handle for that, if you don't already follow me, is at drchatterjee. I'm going to do daily challenges, some live Q&As, and I'm also going to share what amazing kindness challenges are being done by people in the community. Now, if you remember from the conversation I just had with David, kindness is contagious and that one act of kindness can actually impact over 100 people. Then you can make the case that by doing this challenge with all of my Instagram followers, for example, that has the potential to impact over 16 million people. Not bad, right? In this current crisis, wouldn't that be a phenomenal thing to be involved with? So do let David and I know on social media what you thought of our conversation

and let us know whether you are going to get involved or not using the hashtag kindness challenge. So David is on Instagram at David R Hamilton PhD. He's on Twitter also at Dr. Hamilton. Now, if you want to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over, you can head over to the show notes page, drchatterjee.com forward slash 104. And you will see links to all the studies that David mentioned, his social media channels, links to some amazing blogs that David has written on his website, and of course, links to his brilliant books. So guys, as I mentioned beforehand, as we all know, we are living in some pretty crazy times at the moment. And now, more than ever before, please do consider sharing my podcasts with your community.

please do consider sharing my podcasts with your community. I've been putting out weekly podcasts for over two years now with the goal to empower as many people as possible to be the architects of their own health. Everything I have previously spoken about in the podcast, everything I've written about in my three books, I honestly don't think the advice has ever been more important to apply in our own lives than now. Paying attention to the small things that we do each day in our own lifestyle is not only going to help us support

our body's own immune system, it's also going to make us more resilient to all the stresses that we are currently facing and the stresses that we are likely to face in the coming weeks and months. Now, I'm getting asked this question a lot on social media at the moment. What can you guys do to look after yourselves at this time of social distancing and increased isolation? And honestly, the answer I'm giving everyone is the same. The framework that I outlined in my last book, Feel Better in Five, I genuinely believe that it is perfect for the times in which we live. Everything in that book takes only five minutes to do and is free of charge to do as well. Something that's really, really important to me. For those of you who don't have the book to refer to, I'm just going

to explain to you the framework so you can start applying this into your life. Basically every day spend five minutes on your mental health, whether that's with breathing, journaling, creativity, nature, five minutes on your physical health. So that's with breathing, journaling, creativity, nature, five minutes on your physical health. So that's moving your body, whether it's yoga, in intervals, skipping, dancing, strength, whatever it is, but also five minutes on what I call heart health, which is about connecting with others. That could be phoning a friend each day, FaceTiming a relative, it could be doing an act of kindness anything you want so hopefully that frame is going to help you start applying this in your everyday life if you liked the content in this podcast do check out episode 58 with tara swart where we learn more about the power of visualization

you might also be interested in episode 45 with professor francis mcglone on the importance of human touch now a little reminder for you all these episodes including this one are all available to watch on youtube so if you know people who you think would benefit but actually don't listen to audio podcasts please do send them over to my youtube channel where they can also benefit from this information many people are stuck at home they're searching for things to watch on YouTube. So I really hope my back catalogue of podcasts are going to provide real value for people. As always, guys, I do appreciate your support. So leaving a review on a podcast platform makes a massive difference. And of course, sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels which you already do a huge

thank you to vidata chastity for producing this week's podcast richard hughes for audio engineering that is it for today i hope you all stay well make sure you have pressed subscribe and i'll be back shortly with my latest conversation remember you are the architects of your own health making lifestyle change is always worth it Because when you feel better You live more I'll see you next time Thank you.