Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #88 The Very Best Tips to Look After Your Mental Health: Best of 2019

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Over the past 2 years, I have had the privilege of talking with some of the most interesting and insightful voices in health. To celebrate, I am releasing 3 very special episodes at the end of the year which also happens to be the end of the decade! In my new book ‘Feel Better in 5’ I split up health into 3 broad categories: Mind, Body and Heart. The first section ‘Mind’ is all about doing little things each day that will look after your mental health, something that has never been more important than it is today. Our minds are simply not designed for the modern world. The incredible pace of human civilisation has far exceeded our brain’s ability to cope. This is one of the reasons that many of us struggle with anxiety, depression, fatigue and a lack of purpose. In today’s show, I share with you some of the very best clips from previous episodes relating to the topic of our minds. I hope that it will serve as a ‘greatest hits’ of practical tips that you can use each day to look after your minds to feel happier and calmer - simple things that we can all do in our busy lives. You will hear clips from Natasha Devon on what ‘mental fitness’ is and how to ring fence time for it each day, the neurosurgeon, Rahul Jandial, about the effect meditative breathing has on changing your brain waves, the neuroscientist and medical doctor, Tara Swart, on the power of your thoughts and how effective journaling can be, Professor Felice Jacka on the very latest research on how our diet can impact our mood and alleviate some cases of depression and we finish off with the inspirational Matt Haig who shares his amazing and insightful wisdom. If you are a fan of my podcast, I really think you are going to love this very special episode. Sit back, strap yourself in…and enjoy! There are plenty more 5 minute tips for your Mind in my brand new book, Feel Better in 5, which is available to order now - Feel better in 5; Your Daily Plan to Feel Better for Life. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/88 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.

Hi, my name is Rangan 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. feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 88 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chastji and I am your host. Now, I have a very special announcement

to make today for all of my podcast listeners. As you know, my third book, Feel Better in 5, comes out in the UK on December the 26th. However, as a special festive treat, I have decided to release the audiobook version of my book today, a whole one week early. I've not announced this anywhere else yet. I really wanted my loyal podcast listeners to be the very first to know. This new book, Feel Better in 5, is my most practical book to date. Every single health recommendation in the book takes only five minutes and I tackle physical

health, mental health, and importantly, emotional health. Now, I know that many of us find this time of year hectic and stressful, and I know that the five-minute health interventions I outline in my book are going to be invaluable over the festive period for so many of you. That is why I've decided to release the audiobook one week early. I've worked really hard with Penguin on this audiobook to make it a really special and unique offering. There is a bonus conversation which you can only hear on the audiobook where the world's leading experts in human behaviour, Professor BJ Fogg from Stanford University, interviews me. He recently read my book and he very kindly gave it the following testimonial. A superb guide to making lasting

change in your life and one of the best habit change programmes I've ever seen. Deceptively simple, but remarkably effective. It really is an honor to have such a great quote from someone as respected and influential as Professor Fogg. So if you want to hear him interview me as well as get listening right now to feel better in five, you can download the audio book today from Audible, in 5, you can download the audiobook today from Audible, Apple Books, or wherever you get your audiobooks from. Now, on to today's episode, which is the first of three special episodes that I'm releasing at the end of 2019, and actually at the end of the decade. In Feel Better in 5, I split up health into three categories, mind, body, and heart. The first section, mind, is all about doing little things each day that will look after your mental health, something

that has never been more important than it is today. In today's show, I'm going to share with you some of the best clips from previous episodes on this podcast relating to this topic. It's hopefully going to be a little bit like a greatest hits of tips for you to use to look after your mind. Simple things that we can all do in our busy lives. You're going to hear clips from Natasha Devon on what mental fitness is and how to ring fence time for it each day. The neurosurgeon Rahul Jandul about the power of meditative breathing on your brainwaves. The neuroscientist and medical doctor Tara Swart on the power of your thoughts and how effective journaling can be. Professor Felice Jacker on the very latest research on how our diets can help our moods and alleviate some cases of depression. And I finish

off with the inspirational Matt Haig, who shares his amazing and insightful wisdom. If you are a fan of the podcast, I really think you're going to love this special episode. So sit back, strap yourself in, and enjoy. Now, before we get started, as always, I need to do a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, continue to support my podcast. As you may already know, I'm a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes and have been wearing them exclusively for many years now, well before they started supporting this podcast. I've seen incredible results and benefits for myself

and with patients when it comes to mobility, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, and so much more. I really like this brand and everything that they stand for. For listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount. 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. Importantly, they offer a 30-day free trial for new customers. So if you are not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. Perhaps you're thinking about a pair for yourself or even for a loved one at this festive time of year. These shoes are not the traditional festive gift, but one that could be of real benefit to your loved

ones and for the planet, because this is a brand that takes sustainability really, really seriously. You can go to the website to see all of their last shipping dates. The final one for express shipping is the 20th of December, depending on your country. But if you've missed the boat on the last shipping dates, you can think about buying your loved one a meaningful gift of healthy feet for the new year by going to the website and buying a digital gift card. Remember, you can get your 20% off code by going to vivobeth.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. 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, 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 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. 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.

When I was at school, I was a classic sort of perfectionist overachiever, which a lot of people 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. 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, excuse me, because I enjoy it and it, and it gives me, it gives me something, you know, 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 recognize 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 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 you know 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, I used to go to the gym and I used to hate it. 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, 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 and science has shown that um that when you look at fractals when a human being looks at a fractal you 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 you know in grass in in coastlines and lakes and it's it's incredible so it's like

we're hardwired to be in nature so it doesn't surprise me that you're also finding that. When we speak about what people can do when they're stressed out on an LA freeway, when they're about to go into a meeting with a boss and you're anticipating something not going well, when you're coming home and your relationship hasn't been good. The time-tested method and the one that we now know,

see, I don't want to just tell you things without telling you how I know and why I have the privilege to even ask that question. To me, it's meditative breathing. It's a very powerful way to quell that anxiety storm that those instinctive structures have done. I'm going to see my boss and those subcortical structures are firing and they're unhappy, much like you'd see a snake or you're at the edge of a cliff. There's certain things that should be released in your body, but those have been

repurposed in a negative, destructive way where we feel that at work, we feel that at home, we feel that when we look at certain social media. How do we feel that at work, we feel that at home, we feel that when we look at certain social media. How do we tamp that down? Just like we would slowly walk away from a fear of heights, how do we walk away from just the general anxiety that's filled our life during the day? And I deeply believe, and particularly now because there's hardcore data, I'll go into this a little bit, is meditative breathing. I don't know what mindfulness is. I don't know what your mind is thinking or my mind is thinking or your mind is thinking.

But I know that the brain is connected to the lungs and the heart through this thing called a wandering nerve. It comes down. And that the brain can send signals down to your heart and Buddhist monks can slow down their heartbeat. I know when I put a little coil on there for people with epilepsy, kids with epilepsy, a vagal nerve stimulator,

and we send electricity, the electricity can actually go upward into your brain and quell epilepsy. Epilepsy seizure is an aberrant electrical activity of your brain. Think of it as an arrhythmia of your heart is epilepsy of the brain. It's called a vagal nerve stimulator. It's been around for a while. This is something you can look up right now. We put electrical coil on this nerve and it calms electricity. It's not even in the brain, but meditative breathing, deep breathing, and in a count of four to go in, a count of three or two, one to hold, and a slow release. If you do that just a little bit before you engage in that next stress-provoking task, it too works like a vagal nerve stimulator without us having to do

a little surgery to calm the electricity in your brain. And you're saying, well, okay, that sounds, where did you get that? Well, we know meditation has been going on for a long time. We've seen Buddhist monks do certain things and others, Deep divers are a great example of that. But we know this now because a study came out last year. They went through like meditative breathing with these patients and these kids and these young people, and they're watching the electricity change and get closer to that alpha wave, get closer to the calmer electrical signals in their brain after just deep, slow, deliberate breathing. And that's accessible to us all without having to pay for it. Yeah.

That's a great thing. It's free, right? Oh, yeah. The book is not... It's meant to be all the magical things that are right there. I mean, when you pull into work before a big operation, I'll take a few minutes and just slowly breathe. And you can find an app and it's a count of four in, hold for a couple minutes and just slowly breathe.

And you can find an app, and it's a count of four in, hold for a couple, count of four out. And then what happens is you don't have to count as much. It becomes a habit. It becomes a part of your routine. It's free. You don't have to do it for 30 minutes. You're not going to be walking on coals and all the exaggerated things people think about. be walking on coals and all the exaggerated things people think about. It is a resource available to you that has been harnessed for millennia. And that now you have crazy brain surgeons providing you the electrical proof if you're a skeptical kind of person. To me, that's

magic. I talk a lot about health and well-being and you know we often talk about food and exercise and sleep and stress which of course are all very very important but but what I really like about your approach is that you you talk a lot about how important our thoughts are how important our mind is and I don't feel that that gets enough airtime. When we talk about health and well-being, why is it that our thoughts are so important? So I actually think that the pillars that you talk about, like sleep, diet, exercise, mindfulness, they're important to improve the quality of our thoughts. Because if you actually think about it, why are you doing those things? You're not just doing it so that your body is in good shape.

You're doing it so that you can think more clearly, you can do your job better, you can have better relationships. And all of that really boils down to how you think. So all the physical factors put your brain in good condition. and then it's what you do with it that really counts. Yeah I guess it's it works both ways doesn't it because I guess you know paying attention to these physical factors helps your brain function helps you think more clearly but at the same time I guess if you change your mindset and you work on your thoughts it can make it easier to actually do a lot of these physical things we're talking about? Absolutely. I mean, one of the chapters in the book is about that brain-body connection.

So I think because psychology was around for a long time before we could scan brains and bodies, it left us with this sort of idea that there's a cut off at the neck and that what you think and feel isn't connected to what goes on in your body and vice versa. But absolutely, if you're cold or hungry or tired, it affects the quality of thinking. And if you're confident or anxious, it affects the nerves and hormones in your body. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this whole brain-body connection that you do beautifully talk about in the book is so important. And I guess for me, it's something that's really been missing in my medical training. It's something that I think has been missing for a long time in medicine, particularly 20th century medicine, the way we've, you know, the way medicine really, really evolved to do so many great things.

But I think we've lost the idea that really, I guess, people have known for donkey's years. Was that one of your frustrations with medicine? I heard you speaking about that on another one of your podcasts, and it absolutely resonated with me. I was almost relieved to hear you say it, to feel like I'm not the only one. And you'll notice that I sort of started the book by talking about how we evolved and the fact that once we developed this cortex, which is much more a modern part of the brain that we use for articulated speech

and for predicting and planning for the future, the part of the brain that had got us to that point, the intuitive emotional part of the brain, sort of seemed to be downgraded by society, like logic and being able to speak suddenly became important and gut feeling and emotions just became less important. Yeah, I totally agree that there is that societal narrative, isn't there, that logic is key and intuition sort of gets marginalized and feelings get marginalized.

What I think you've done so well, and obviously you're very well trained, you know, huge, huge scientific backgrounds. You have brought some of these ideas that have been there before to life, but you've got some scientific grounding in them now. And one of your, you know, I guess one of your core concepts is how do we create the life that we want? How do we be in charge of what happens to our life rather than let life sort of happen to us? Is that something you feel you've always had an inkling towards? Or is this something that has really evolved in your thinking in the past few years? It's funny you should say that because as I look back now, it feels like a lot of the concepts in the book were always there in the way that I lived my life. But even since writing the

book, I've come up with this new analogy, which is, let's say you and I want to go on a journey. Would you rather be sitting in the passenger seat and I choose where we go and the route that we take? Or would you rather be driving and choosing the destination? It's kind of like that in life. It's very easy to go through the motions every day and let life happen to you. But if you think about it, if we stop and step back, we have a lot more choice in what we tolerate and what happens to us and the choices that we make than we necessarily think. It's easy to just sort of

go on autopilot. And I think that's something that really does happen these days, doesn't it? Many people are living life on a treadmill day to day, week to week before you know another year's gone by. I think there are some really powerful tools in your approach. I just want to touch on journaling. So I'm aware that you know journaling, I know what journaling is, but some people listening to this may have heard that term, but may not really understand what is it? How do I journal? So, you know, if someone has never done this before, and they want to, how might they start? So you literally get a blank sort of diary. And you can start by just saying what happened to you today. So you know, I could literally say,

And you can start by just saying what happened to you today. So, you know, I could literally say I woke up earlier than usual, feeling a bit grumpy, went to, you know, meet Rangan and do this podcast, immediately cheered up. And even just in that little snippet, what you've realized is maybe if I don't get enough sleep that it affects my mood. Maybe if I'm with somebody who I really respect and have fun with, that improves my mood. You've learned something already just by recording that. Over time, you can get down to talking about things like emotions and intuition. You're basically talking to yourself. You're recording it to look at later. So you might say, you know, I had an argument with this person and this is how it left me feeling. I wish I hadn't said X. If something like this happened again, this is what

I'd choose to do in future. So you basically use the journal as a way to sort out your thoughts, to get them out of your head and sort of be able to look at them more objectively and create a narrative that you can look back at and make certain different decisions about your future. I do journal from time to time. I haven't made it a constant daily practice, but I go through periods of time in my life where for a few days, a few weeks, I will journal. And I personally like doing it first thing in the morning as part of my morning routine. And I wonder if you know about this as a neuroscientist, but I'm not entirely sure. But sometimes I feel you've know, you've been in a deep seat,

you've woken up, there's so much going around in your subconscious. And when you just start writing first thing in the morning, I sort of feel that what I'm doing is I'm just helping to process my subconscious mind and get it out onto paper. So as you say, it's getting out of my head and onto paper. And one of the big problems I see these days is that people are living in their heads. They've got all kinds of anxieties fears insecurities rushing around their brain but the simple act of writing it out in some way quite literally takes it from your brain and out you know onto paper well I fully believe that um just like doing aerobic exercise um can help you to reduce levels

of the stress hormone cortisol, that speaking out loud or writing down these thoughts that are racing round and round in your head instead of suppressing them or just letting them build up, you know, till it feels like your head's going to explode is a way of reducing stress. So actually, if you've got anxieties or negative thoughts

and you write them down or you have somebody that you trust that you can talk to, it gets it out of your brain body system, just exactly like exercising can release stress hormones from your brain body system. Just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. To be really clear, I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods. But for some of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. So if you are 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. Felice, I've got to tell you from my perspective, I'm so excited to be talking to you. I have been reading your research for years. Your SMILES trial, I think I've lectured to hundreds, if not over a thousand doctors now, talking about that data, talks about it in both of my books. So you are someone who I have been following for a while and thank

you for making the journey out to my house today to talk. Such a pleasure. Well, let's dive into that research because I think the SMILES trial, which is, you know, I remember seeing that when it came out thinking, oh my God, this is the first time that I had seen a randomized control trial showing how diets can improve symptoms of depression, you know, using the same level of evidence that we would expect from a pharmaceutical drug. What we did in that study was we recruited people with major clinical depression and we randomly assigned them to get either social support or dietary support for a period of three months. Now, the social support, we already know that that's helpful for people with depression. That's just going and talking to someone. You could be talking

about the football or your grandchildren or whatever, but we know that it's helpful and it's called a befriending protocol. They often use it in psychotherapy trials as a control condition. And then the other groups are a clinical dietician for three months. And that dietician just worked with those people to help them to gradually make positive changes

to their diet, to set some goals, to do it in a way that was feasible and achievable for them. And that was things like swapping out their refined carbs, their white flour, white bread, et cetera, for whole grain versions, increasing the amount of vegetables and fruit in their diet, starting to eat more legumes, so your lentils and chickpeas, et cetera, having some nuts and seeds, eating fish, getting some olive oil into their diet but also really importantly reducing the intake of you know the junk and processed foods the sweets and cakes and

chocolate and fried foods over a three-month period and at the end of the study because we only had 67 people we had no expectation whatsoever that we would see a significant difference between the groups on the depression outcomes. We just thought it was incredibly unlikely. And I sat with the statistician and we did the stats, she did the stats, and it was, you know, you don't unblind the groups until the end. We just knew it was group A and group B. And there was just this massive difference in the depression scores after three months. And we were just completely blown away. How big a difference? Well, to put it into, I guess, a meaningful context, more than 30% of the people in the

dietary group achieved what we would call full remission, where they just weren't depressed at all anymore. And that was compared to about 8% in the social support group. So, hold on, we just got to pause there because that is absolutely remarkable. You were talking about people who have got moderate or severe depression, who literally were doing exactly what they were doing. If they were on treatment, I believe they stayed on everything that they were doing, but they were just split into two groups. And if you change your diet, within 12 weeks, you got above a 30% remission rate in symptoms of depression.

That is absolutely staggering. What is a nervous planet? Well, nervous in the sense that I think a lot of us are feeling stressed out because of the 21st century pace of living and this kind of overloaded culture of everything which is often kind of paralyzing but also nervous in the sense that of a nervous system as sort of like we're connected in ways that we're we've never been connected before so we're kind of our emotions and our psychology influence each other and we've got that's a wider influence than it used to be when we used to live in a hunter-gatherer communities of at most 100 people now we can encounter 100 new people

before getting out of bed we are saturated with everything and it's you know it's parallel i think a lot of the inverted commas craziness of the world to our own mental states. And we're not making that connection. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so much in this book, Notes on a Nervous Planet. I'd highlight a couple of areas I just thought would be quite interesting to talk about. I mean, you know, could probably spend four hours just talking about this book. You've got the section on time. We need the time we already have. I really loved it because you finish it off saying, we often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. The problem clearly

is that it isn't that we have a shortage of time it's more that we have an overload of everything else i think that just sums up so beautifully um is this something you've been sitting with a lot you know in terms of when you were writing this i mean yeah and i you know something you know maybe hitting your 40s you and having kids grow older you're aware of the passing of time but i i'm you know i feel like we all say it don't we we all say if only i had the time i'd read more or i'd do this more i'd travel more and we're all feeling that absence of time but in real terms we've got as much time if not more than any humans have ever had and yet so something else is at play and i think there's two things one we've got more literal

demands on our time and also we we have kind of conditioned ourselves to live somewhere else than the present so you know i'm a great fan of the education system i'm from a family of teachers but i sometimes think the whole education system is a kind of reverse mindfulness where you're you're continually thinking about the future so you're learning not for its own sake but you're learning for grades for exams for the job at the end of it then you go to university or not and then you're thinking about the career path you take and so from a young age we're trained to always have that sort of forward thinking that forward momentum and it carries on into the workplace in our careers and it doesn't encourage we're not encouraged to just be grateful in the moment for what we have or know how to appreciate what we have and i feel like

continually where it's always about accumulating something now for instance my latest technological obsession is my pacer app on my phone to see how many steps i've done now it's a good thing to encourage people to to walk more and i'm a great fan of walking more but the fact that we turn everything into a number means that we're constantly trying to accumulate so i'm always worried now if i've done my 10 000 steps and it doesn't matter the quality of those steps where i'm walking i just want to reach for 10 000 number and whether it's our income bracket whether it's you know our grades at school whether it's like you know a measurement we want to our bodies to be or whatever it is we're conditioned i feel to feel like we're not quite enough in the present moment and we've always got to

become the after picture we've got to become the next version of ourselves and it it's easy to forget that we're actually everything we need is really already there but we just sort of pile too much stuff on it and we sometimes lose ourselves yeah i think this is probably one of the biggest problems in this nervous planet in which we're currently living in is that it's never enough there's always something else to do there's always somebody else doing something that is perceived to be better that you think oh you know i i will be happy when i do this and then you achieve it and you're like oh it's not really made much difference to how i feel about myself i think often it's

about slowing down in some way so for me personally um I know you're a great believer in it too, but I believe physical health and mental health are so interlinked. So one of the things that helped me early on and really helped me get over panic attacks was just going running. And I know not everyone can do it or wants to do it, but for me, having that space away from people from my work from everything else just getting out going running was a massive help and I know it sounds funny but there's a kind of truth to it where when I was running I knew that was a place I couldn't have a panic attack

because the symptoms of running other symptoms of a panic attack you've got the breathlessness you've got the racing heart you're sweating but you know why you are and it's kind of a pain that you can control over so i found it very empowering not just on the endorphin level and the feeling of accomplishment but actually it gave you that sense of sort of control which panic took away and you know i'm great so running and yoga are my things i love doing yoga yoga came later i actually started doing yoga for my back rather than for my anxiety but i noticed that it was having a knock-on effect and whether that was simply just taking that time for myself slowing my breathing down which is something i still

watch um another thing which is really important for me is sleep you know it seems out of the triumvirate of diet exercise sleep sleep is often the neglected one you're preaching to the converted yeah i'm just nodding my head yeah and i think you know because no one really makes money out of our sleep you know know, other than duvet manufacturers and people who make blackout blinds. But, you know, sleep. And in fact, I mentioned it. And I'm happy for them to make money. It's a good service.

Yeah, exactly. It's a good service. But we've got a lot of people making money out of us not sleeping. You know, the head of Netflix last year, I think he was being tongue in cheekek but also slightly serious said that netflix's main competitor is sleep you know if they can get people to stay up to three in the morning watching episode seven of whatever the good life or whatever then the good place then um they will you know be making more um value for netflix and so and we do you know our quality of sleep has changed as you know and you know the actual hours we spend asleep changes and obviously social media is a big part of that having our

phones by the bed and all of that can be bad for that but i think essentially it's about creating a space however whatever it is whether it's doing yoga whether it's reading a book whether it's going for a run where we're just unplugged we're just ourselves we're not working we're not worried about the money that we're not making or whatever and we can just be rather than you know the reverse of the nike slogan just do it you know where we can just actually be just almost disconnecting in order to reconnect absolutely absolutely that concludes today's episode of a very special compilation feel better live more podcast i really hope you enjoyed hearing those clips that my team and i have put together what was your favorite tip do let me know on social media on facebook instagram twitter and on linkedin

of course some of you will be hearing these clips for the first time, but for some of you, it may well be the second time. Either way, if you want to actually go back and listen to the full episode with one of my guests today, just go to the show notes page for this episode, which is drchastity.com forward slash 88, and you will see clickable links to all of the original episodes. Now, just a quick reminder that my latest book, Feel Better in 5, comes out in the UK in just one week. Of course, you will have heard in the introduction today that the audiobook is available from today, but the actual paperback and e-book will be available on Boxing Day. And don't forget, if you pre-order a copy before December the 26th,

Penguin will send you out a free Feel Better in 5 success chance. One of the key principles of being able to make new behavior stick in the long run is to celebrate your success. And this free success chance has been designed around my book and will make it really easy for you to track your progress on my feel better in five plan so if you go to drchastity.com forward slash fbi5chart you will see an email address to which you can send in your receipts this offer applies to all orders placed before december the 26th so even if you have already pre-ordered the book,

you are absolutely still able to claim your free chart. Also, just a quick reminder, in January 2020, I will be hitting the road and speaking live and doing book signings in various cities around the UK. You can see all the dates at drchatterjee.com forward slash events. I really hope to meet some of you in person this January. Before the end of the year, in fact, before the end of the decade, I'm going to be releasing two more very special compilation episodes.

So do keep your eye on your email if you are signed up to my weekly newsletter or keep an eye on your podcast app and make sure that you have pressed subscribe if you enjoy my weekly shows please do consider leaving a review on apple podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on and you can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels i really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing, and Vedanta Chatterjee and Joe Murphy for producing this week's show.

That is it for today. I really hope each and every single one of you have a fantastic Christmas and festive season, whatever you choose to do. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe, and I'll be back in about one week's time with my latest episode. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time. Thank you.