Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #217 BITESIZE | How to Improve Your Mental Fitness | Natasha Devon

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 57 of the podcast with body image and mental health campaigner Natasha Devon. In this clip, she explains why it's so important to keep our mind fit and healthy and gives some great tips for maintaining our mental fitness. Why does mental health mean so much to you? I have a diagnosis of panic disorder myself, and I didn't receive that diagnosis until I was 31.

Starting point is 00:01:55 I'm almost 38 now, so that's a very small chunk of my life where I actually knew who my enemy was. When I look back with the knowledge that I have now, I realized I had my first panic attack when I was 10, but I didn't know what it was and neither did anyone around me. And I was misdiagnosed quite a lot with asthma and allergies and all kinds of things which were sort of physical in their nature as opposed to psychological. And it struck me that we're so fearful around mental illness diagnosis. We see it as a label. And in fact, for me, it was the opposite. It was when I received the diagnosis, it was just such a huge relief because I could make the necessary alterations to my life to live with this thing, you know and and just the same as if I had diabetes

Starting point is 00:02:45 it's part of who I am but it's not it doesn't define me so I guess I'm trying to be the sort of friendly face of mental illness and say to people it doesn't have to be a life sentence what I'm trying to convey at the moment to young people is there is such a thing as mental fitness so I think we're starting to understand mental illness is there is such a thing as mental fitness. So I think we're starting to understand mental illness, but there is also mental fitness, which is like, if it was a graph, that would be the vertical axis. And if you think it's important, for example, to take time to exercise every day for your physical health, there are equivalents that you can do for your mental health. And I believe that we live in a culture which kind of fetishizes overworking and not

Starting point is 00:03:27 taking time for self-care. And as well, the notion of self-care has been commoditized. So it's almost become this laughable thing of like, oh, have a lavender bath type thing. But actually that's not what it is. What all self-care is, is ring fencing time every day to restore your chemical balance. And that's what mental fitness is. would think is a good thing. But what people don't understand about perfectionists is that, first of all, you are constantly beating yourself up. Nothing you ever do is good enough in your mind. But also that you don't do things that you think you won't be good at. So there's loads of things that have intrinsic value. Like, for example, you know, now I love to exercise, but I will never be any good at it. You know, I'm never going to be an athlete, a natural athlete. That doesn't matter because I

Starting point is 00:04:25 enjoy it and it gives me something that I need. So I would say throughout school, I was kind of channeling my nervous energy into studying, overachieving, always wanting the top grade, never thinking that anything I did was good enough. And whilst on paper, my academic career looks like a successful one, it doesn't really tell the story of how I felt about it. Yeah, I think that's, I guess I was pausing and reflecting as you were saying that, because some of those personality traits I can recognise in myself and the striving for perfection and only doing things that you know you can be good at. And I feel I've changed a lot in that area over the last years as I've done a lot of deep emotional work on myself and actually

Starting point is 00:05:09 tried to figure out where that stuff comes from. Do you feel that you've had an evolution in the last few years whereby you can now enjoy something, as you say, for its intrinsic value rather than because it's going to get that external validation? That's right. And there's another element to it as well of being a woman in the society, the culture that we have in Britain and in America and other places throughout the world, where you are from your earliest moments kind of taught to see your body as an enemy or something that you need to sort of tweak and shape into an acceptable form. And a lot of people I think exercise because they're trying to change their body rather than for the joy of it. And like a lot of people that grew up in Essex, um, I used to go to the gym and I used to hate it. It was, it was, uh, you know, uh, a bi-daily torture that was all about shaping my body into, um, and punishing my body for not being that shape naturally. Whereas now, um, I go to the park,

Starting point is 00:06:19 um, you know, I do it in nature that there's actually a lot of evidence to show that if you exercise outside it magnifies the endorphin production um and and i do it because you know i'm celebrating my body rather than apologizing for my body yeah absolutely um have you heard of something called fractals before no yes fractals are these geometric shapes that you only get in nature um and we've shown that when you look at fractals, when a human being looks at a fractal, you lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why nature is so powerful for us. But you only get fractals in nature, in trees, in grass, in coastlines, in lakes. And it's incredible. So it's like we're hardwired

Starting point is 00:07:06 to be in nature. So it doesn't surprise me that you're also finding that. You mentioned body and we're taught to think about our bodies as an enemy. And I guess body image and the way we view our bodies, is that a problem at the moment? and the way we view our bodies. Is that a problem at the moment? So the way it was explained to me, there's a small group of scientists at University of Central London who specifically look at gender and its relationship to mental health. And everything that they write is endlessly fascinating to me. And one of the things that they say in their research is it's about shame triggers. So for women, the majority, not all, but for the majority of women, the shame trigger relates to beauty. And for the majority of men, the shame trigger relates to strength. often begin with an obsession with exercise and muscle building and then the food restrictions come later whereas with women it's more likely to be the other way around it begins with food

Starting point is 00:08:11 restriction and then compulsive exercise and that's because of the differences in in the shame trigger so it's it's kind of it's harder to shame a man just for not looking the way we think men should look whereas with women women, it's pretty straightforward, which is why low body image is correlated in women with things like depression and anxiety. I worked with a guy called Dr. David Bainbridge. He's at Cambridge University, and he wrote a book called Curvology, and it was looking at the evolution of female body shape. And one of the things it says in the book is there are all kinds of reasons why women in particular are incredibly diverse in our body shape. And it was the first

Starting point is 00:08:52 time that I went, oh, so we're meant to look radically different from one another. And yet we're all aspiring to this very narrow idea of what beauty is. We're speaking a lot about physical health and mental health and how we're trying to give mental health the same or similar awareness to physical health. Now, a lot of people will say that there's no difference. Why are we separating out physical health and mental health? Surely it's part of the same picture. What are your views on that? I agree with that um the body and the mind don't exist in silos and something i discovered recently is that eight out of ten primary age children who go to their school nurse with stomachache are experiencing stomachache because they're anxious and the

Starting point is 00:09:36 ancient egyptians actually believe that your brain and your stomach were the same organ yeah they're so closely correlated and And then I also read that 90% of back pain has no physically attributable cause that you could see in an x-ray is where people hold their stress. So I think utopia would be a culture in which we don't, we just talk about health, but we're not there yet. So we need to raise the awareness of mental health to a point where people are taking it as seriously first. Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. I also agree. I think they are the same thing. I think health is health and it's all interconnected. And you mentioned, was it the Egyptians? Yes. Yeah. Which is incredible because what I find fascinating as a doctor is that

Starting point is 00:10:19 we're getting a lot of science now to back up what a lot of these ancient cultures have been saying for donkey's years. The gut brain axis, right? Well, the Egyptians were saying that, but you know, maybe we in the West have sort of not taken that kind of stuff seriously because it's not based on hard science. Whereas actually now, you know what? You know, I think human beings have known intuitively for thousands, tens of thousands of years, how to take care of ourselves. And so I find that super interesting. I really like this idea of mental fitness. It just makes a lot of sense. And this podcast is really about trying to have interesting conversations, sure, but it's about trying to inspire each and every listener to become the architects of their own health. And I wonder if

Starting point is 00:11:01 you can leave the listeners with some of your top tips on what they can do that are hopefully going to improve their mental fitness. So you want to, like I said, ring fence time every day for your mental fitness. So Mental Health First Aid England, who I do a lot of work with, they recommend an hour of self-care a day. I happen to think that that's slightly unrealistic for the average person. So I always ask people to aim for half an hour. And in that half an hour, you want to be doing an activity which falls into one of these three categories. The first is physical activity. The second is relaxation. And the third is creativity. And there's a huge number of things that you could do that fall into those categories. But, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:45 listening to or making music, writing in a journal, going for a walk, but you're just topping up then your mental fitness or mental health first aid, England describe it as emptying your stress bucket. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more.

Starting point is 00:12:36 I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #217 BITESIZE | How to Improve Your Mental Fitness | Natasha Devon

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