Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How Kindness Boosts Your Immune System, The Power of Visualisation & The Importance of Empathy with Dr David Hamilton #602

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

This is the time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind and spend time with the people we love. To celebrate, I have decided to re-release a conversation that took place on this podcast almost 6 years ago now with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher and one of the world's leading experts in the science of kindness. He is also the author of multiple bestselling books including Why Kindness Is Good For You and How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body. This conversation was actually recorded all the way back in February 2020, one month before the start of COVID. But, as with most of the conversations on my podcast, the content within it is timeless and just as relevant today as it was when we actually recorded it. In our conversation, we explore many different themes including: How empathy and kindness can impact various markers of our health, including the functioning of our immune systems and our cardiovascular health Why David calls oxytocin the ‘kindness hormone’ How exactly we can use visualisation to improve the quality of our lives, The science of the placebo effect The importance of connection and empathy in healthcare And the phenomenal ripple effect of kindness, whereby one act of kindness can lead to one hundred and twenty-five more. David is such a wonderful human being who is doing his very best to help create a kinder and more compassionate world. I think this conversation is perfect for the current time of year and I hope that it serves as a gentle reminder that being kind is not only good for the world around us, it’s good for ourselves as well…….   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/602   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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 ten 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 the function of the immune system. Hey guys, how you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far.

My name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee. And this is my podcast. Feel better, live more. This is the time of year, at least in the UK, when people are gearing up for Christmas. Now, I'm well aware that Christmas represents different things to different people. And of course, not everyone chooses to celebrate it. But there is no question that in many countries around the world, this is a time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind,

and spend time with the people we love. So to celebrate, I thought I would re-release a conversation that took place on this podcast almost six years ago now. with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher, and someone who is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on the science of kindness. He's also the author of multiple best-selling books,

including why kindness is good for you and how your mind can heal your body. Now, this conversation was actually recorded all the way back in February 2020, one month before the start of COVID, but, as with most of the conversations on my podcast, the content within it is timeless, and just as relevant today as it was when we first recorded it.

In our conversation, we explore many different themes, including how empathy and kindness can impact various markers of our health, including our immune system and cardiovascular system. why David calls oxytocin the kindness hormone, how exactly we can use visualization to improve the quality of our lives, the science of the placebo effect, the importance of connection and empathy in healthcare,

and a phenomenal ripple effect of kindness, whereby one act of kindness can lead to 125 more. David is such a wonderful human being who is doing his very best to help create a kinder and more compassionate world. And I think this conversation is perfect for the current time of year. And I hope that it serves as a gentle reminder that being kind is not only good for the world around us. It's good for ourselves as well.

So you've come down from... Dunblane, Central Scotland. Famous laterally for Andy Murray and Jamie Murray the tennis plays 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're fit and healthy and you don't play tennis, it's kind of frowned upon. That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. 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 training and stuff. So I love it. Oh, fantastic. Play three, four times a week. That's so interesting that this small town is at Dunblane, I wonder if we compare the tennis participation rates in Dunblane, you know, the home of Andy and Jamie Murray, or certainly the former home of them, 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. Oh, 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.

Yeah. Right? 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. on, that really broadly cover the different ways that your mind and emotions and your behaviour 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 it 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've got three sisters. My youngest sister was born in mid-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

shattered her self-esteem and she would feel really low about herself and like she's just not a strong person. 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 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 bet that I 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, get the 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 mom would

often use affirmations and she would do meditation and she would 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 started 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 mini 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 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 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. I just started secondary school. But my main, 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 interesting. Well, that's interesting because you picked up that book for you moment at the age of 11. Now, look, my kids aren't yet 11. My son's 9. And I'm going to guess that 11 is still at that age where 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. Did you ever start to get skeptical about the importance of the minds? 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 minds. So I'm super fascinating. Did you go through this period of skepticism somewhere and then come out the other side? Or what? Happen. Surprisingly, not so much. What I would say is I just forgot about it. Yeah. 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 it that I actually just forgot, really. I remember reading Norman Vincent Peel, 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. I was literally.

literally in the middle of my second year of my PhD and all of a sudden, 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?

And then you see who has, you know, has there been a statistically significant 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're 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, 100 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 and is that what happened with you

you thought hold on a minute well how can we explain that pretty much and seen it because because I was a chemist so close to building the drug I mean literally organic chemist like me it's like adults who play with Lego blocks but instead of using

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 effect. Just the placebo effect. And it was a sweeping movement of the right hand, even left hand, I think you learn it 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 at 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 a painkiller a placebo what they think it's a painkiller then and it works depending it can work really really well depending on the or empathy used by the person who suggested to 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. To morphine is an opiate. We have our natural versions and they're called endogenous opates, 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 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, it doesn't matter. And I've got to say, you know, I think still as a medical profession, I don't think we take the placebo seriously enough. I mean, what do you think? Do you think things have changed in the last 10, 20 years? It's definitely changing. I think when 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 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. David, when I want to hear that, it reminds me of something that I often say, I've said it, you know, 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 second reason, 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 on what you're saying, right? that if 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 and gets the gym a bit more you know what you know this 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 as a profession

is because a lot of the time we're not communicating it in a way that makes sense to them and actually deeply connects with them. I know. And it's that deep connection has tremendous physical effects. In fact, 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 100 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 oh 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 receive 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 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 I don't know if that's been studied but I wouldn't have actually has actually there was a clip of Oprah Winfrey during the time of the Oprah show and she was I forget with the exact nature of the clip but she was really changing people's lives

and it was something to do with a school teacher and a class and 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 like a five-minute clip 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 to 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, oh, do this, do that.

There's just something deeper. And that is something that, for me, it's 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 sequitory or SIGA is so interesting to me. I've also studied immunology, and for people wondering what SIGA is, 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 guts, which is super interesting. And that's called your mucosal immune system. And the primary, the main sort of defense molecule of that is SRG, a secretory RGA. So it's a thing that that can go up with this kind of compassion. Compassion being practiced. Yeah, it's incredible. There are studies

aren't there about recovering quicker from colds, I think, and the flu. What was something to do with compassion? Yeah, I think there's some research looking at the more compassion that, let's say, a doctor feels, as 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, you know, 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 was no, or 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, I, I don't know if you're familiar with someone called Professor Francis McGlone. I used him on the podcast about a year ago. He helped me actually write the chapter on touch in my second book, The Stress Solution. He's one of the world's leading researchers in touch, basically. 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.

And he talks about these two different kinds of touch nerve fibres. You've got one, which is the fast one, which simply tells you where you've been touched. You know, if I touch you on your forearm, you know, 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, his work has shown that it's a different kind of nerve fiber. It's called the CT aphrine that goes up to a different part of the brain, the emotional brain.

And when you get that stroked, oxytocin levels go up. Blood pressure goes down. Heart rate goes down. Natural killer cells, which are part of your immune system, go up. Amazing. 50 to 70%. So we're seeing a similarity but also that most of those

C-tactile aphrant nerve fibres so that that slower nerve fibre that gives you that nice warm, cuddly feeling most of them are on your upper back and your shoulder. So what's fascinating about that is is that why would evolution put something like that

on a very hard-to-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. And so the touchgiver, 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 or it feels good, right? As you're showing, and as Francis McLone has shown, it changes things. chemically. And for me, it's fascinating that it's the same hormone oxytocin. So, you know,

I mean, what do you make of that? Today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot. The human foot is a masterpiece, 26 bones, 33 joints and over 100 muscles and tendons that evolve to move us and ground us. But unfortunately, we've lost touch with our natural connection to the earth through modern footwear. Barefoot shoes are a tool to restore that primal link between brain and body, foot and earth. I've been wearing Vivo barefoot shoes for over 12 years now and there is simply no way I would go back to wearing cushioned shoes. What many people don't realize when they are used to wearing cushion shoes is just how disconnected they have become

from their feet and the way their feet interact with the ground. Vivo barethought strips away the unnecessary. No thick, spongy foam, no elevated heels, just thin, flexible protection that lets your feet move, stretch and strengthen the way nature intended. The science is simple. When your feet can feel, your body moves better. I have felt it myself and experienced feedback

from thousands of patients and friends. over the years, who have also felt the incredible benefits of wearing barefoot shoes. As well as their regular office shoes and athletic shoes, Vivo also have a fantastic range of winter boots. And my current favourite are the tracker forest. Absolutely fantastic feel. They are really comfortable, really warm, and at the same time have insane amounts of grip. I cannot recommend Vivo Barefoot Shoes enough and if you want to give them a try, please do use Vivo's online sizing tools to ensure that you find your own perfect fit. Step into better health and freedom for your feet. Get 15% off your first Vivo Barefoot's order plus a 100 day discovery periods

with money back guarantee. Visit Vivo Barefoot.com forward slash live more and start your barefoot journey today. Actually, you mentioned the animal thing. I love animals. I lost my dog a few years ago. He had bone cancer. It 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 since someone who's had one already.

they have a dog, it's 400% 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 than 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 pumen and nearly doubled in the dog for doing nothing other than warm, playful interactions, robbing the tummy, just warm interaction. You get the same thing with humans. But the reason I mentioned it is because you mentioned dogs there

and I love animals 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, let's expand on that because that is a novel concept for people that the sort of things you're talking about, human touch, connection, 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? 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 emotionally we get the opposite effects. 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 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 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 behaviors. 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 digest that, you know, aggression and hostility, for example, reduce levels of the kindness hormone, oxytocin, and therefore we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin is now called a cardio-protective hormone, meaning it protects the cardiovascular system. One of the ways it does it is to reduce blood pressure.

So 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, yeah, this is so fascinating. So fascinating.

And I'm drawing all kinds of connections in my heads 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 of smoking 15 cigarettes

a day. Incredible. It's incredible. But then when you try and make the case that oxytocin might be the cardiac protective 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 of rewarding you. saying yes more of this please i will make you healthy keep doing that yeah yeah in fact you know the the the the genin for oxytocin uh the 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 i'm not 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 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 and 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, skin cells and that's why children

who are deprived of love and affection 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 at 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 than we are to other humans. So if you show your smartphone compassion

and you touch your smartphone, does it also release oxytocin? Well, do you know, you've made me think there. I was joking, but unless you're going to pull out Research study. No, I wasn't, I was going to pull out the film Castaway with Tom Hanks. Okay.

And I, you know, remember, was it Wilson? He called that, was it a coconut or a football? He called it Wilson. I have not seen it, actually. All right, well, years ago. But Garrowth, he's videoing this in the background is nodding his head, seriously. 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 it. And he spoke to it as if it was a person. and 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 to 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 matter if you can bond with even in that case an inanimate object it 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 teddy bear something that you feel

you can bond with it's that bonding itself that releases the oxygen and so we're wired to bond and to connect yeah I love that and you know the idea of a child

with their teddy or even this film inanimate objects and again yeah it 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? The idea of even saying that, most people laugh at that because we'll use

our smartphones. But let's say you were to paint a wee smiley face on it and maybe something happened to you that the only thing you had was the smartphone and you just made a connect, maybe 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. 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 the, 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 behaviour 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 with 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 people, the way in which you interact with people becomes more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit.

And that, I think, becomes your way. I'm speaking from experience here because I have completely changed as a person 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 mean I wasn't

not I wasn't meaning as a horrible person but relative I have made large gains I guess in the I guess the quality of person that I've become and I've become gentler more compassionate more kind. I cry a lot more 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, you know, that's not me. And it almost feels a little bit of forced. But I think you can force it a little bit and actually make and turn it into your reality. And it's something, you know, it's something that I talk about. All 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 and you know I think

initially it was a bit tricky it's oh I'm not sure I'm not sure you know there 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 dinner 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're saying at the start which we're going to explore is the power of our minds on our bodies. 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 a block once.

It's a practice. So anything that you do to get better at is something that you practice. So I think when you practice being kind, that's amazing game that you play with the kids. Have you actually out of interest, have you noticed that as 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. And 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. And, 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 possibly trying to cultivate that on my children is also. upskilling me in that area as well.

And I noticed that a lot in my interactions now on social media and that, you know, even when someone, which is very rare these days, but if someone's left a snarty 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. I think that whole idea that the kindness is the opposite of stress is a really beautiful concept. What happens when we get angry? Like, I know from a stress perspective in terms of the stress hormones, and I have seen anger that we hold on to for years. and resentment, it is toxic. It can absolutely raise your blood pressure.

And I've got a few patients of mine who I couldn't get that blood pressure down with medication, with diets, with lysar 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. Is that something you're familiar with?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's better to get it out than in. I mean, some of these people say, you shouldn't be angry but you need to get it out there's got to be some way of venting you know I'm not advocating you know being unkind to people 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 book recently called expressive writing by a professor called James Pennybaker 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 that's a basic structure to vent and sometimes you can swear and you could anger but the idea the act of expressing it

gradually has an amazing effect because in one of their studies they found that their immune response to an end of toxin was significantly higher than those who hadn't done the expressive right. And so the immune system is becoming more robust as a consequence of expressive right. That's incredible.

And for people listening who are not familiar with what an endotoxin is, you know, one way of describing it is that inside your gut, 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 coat, 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 cause 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 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 visits to the medical center and they found that those who did the expressive writing had significantly lower need to visit the medical centre, having just got anger and hurt and trauma out of their system a little bit. You've got to process it in some way.

And actually this whole British characteristic of stiff up a 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 good evidence out that it gets stored in your body and it can impact muscle tightness and all kinds of things People are trying to stretch it out, but actually often it's unprocessed emotions that I've seen it 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 today, which is simply incredible. And, you know, because if we don't, then it's possible to start fitting the cardiovascular status. I mean, one of the, I guess one of my favorite titles of a study is called, marital conflict relations and coronary artery calcification or cack for sure 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 of time asked them to discuss marital topics for for half an hour and the the videotaped them and the 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 say were softer people, a 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'd normal what you would call soft arteries when you controlled in the study for diet and exercise smoking drinking etc the only difference really was how you behaved in that half an hour and that was taken as a proxy for normal behaviour 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 of 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. 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 and that stress to a certain degree another tip that um actually a friend of mine gave me he uses it himself and 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 and i can't tell you it is it is incredibly beneficial because as as you've already demonstrated with some of 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. 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've noticed is we think of a feeling and an emotion is, 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 zygomaticous major muscle that pulls your lips into

smile is connected in some way to, 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 onto 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 that emotion isn't just a feeling it's connected to your

It's part of 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 want to express themselves, they use their body to express. So what happened is it 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 help change how you feel in the moment kind of thing. you know i suppose to a lot of um therapists recently who you know work on people's bodies whether it's a sports massage therapist um whatever kind of therapist but they will tell you that you can feel or they can feel particularly when they're doing it for a period of years I can tell what's going on in that person's life I can feel how stress they are from the tone of their muscles and how their body feels now look that's not my skill set so I

I can't, but it's really interesting to hear that. Yeah. And I guess David Dino, as you're telling me, you know, 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 science to medicine or whatever. you know we in some ways we're being a little bit derogatory about them like almost as if we feel a need to soften it like quite literally whereas you know it's not quite as um you know as as as as as

as robust as you know what's the oxygen level of the blood as it pumps out of the heart you know or is it because is it just a perception because you're a scientist by training Are you a sciences by degree? You've got a PhD in organic chemistry. 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 visualization. You know, what do your former colleagues think of what you're doing now? Do they know? Are you still in touch with them?

Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to the brand new updated formulation of AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, this is the time of year when our immune systems are under the most pressure. Between spending more time indoors, travel, and seasonal bugs, it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defenses. But most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. they want something simple, effective and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity supporting nutrients,

vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system. These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use, backed by clinical research, expert formulation and continuous improvement, AG1 has been in my own life for around seven years now, and each batch is independently tested for quality and safety. That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not.

And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty, daily serving. And right now, AG1 is giving you their best, ever offer only until the end of December, that is worth an incredible $126. If you head to drinkag1.com forward slash live more and place your first order, you will get for free the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a year's supply of vitamin D3 and K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and you'll also get to try their brand new sleep supplement, which is absolutely fantastic and something that I have been taking in the evening for the past few months.

That's $126 in free gifts for new subscribers only until the end of December. You can see all details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. 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 that I'm still in touch with I think some of them probably think it's a bit kind of woo-woo but most of them that I've been in touch with over the years are greatly supportive in fact they're so fascinated by

isn't this amazing I had no idea for example that you know if you mentioned visualization there if you visualize moving your body then in some ways your brain processes as if you're actually doing it. I remember telling one of my former colleagues that they go, what? Really? So I got out the brain scans and showed them. He's like, whoa, amazing.

And it's not that, you know, I think skepticism is sometimes a product of just not knowing. It just doesn't sound possible. It's not that you know, it just doesn't sound because I've never heard anything like that before. It's not within your frame of reference. It's not the education model which you've been taught. It never came into that.

Exactly. So therefore there probably is a natural skill. skepticism. But as you say, the way to change that is to give them the science in a way that they already understand it. I go, hey, look, did you know that? And 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 a flexing, your finger right for 15 minutes a day yeah 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 in a piano so they basically put hands flat on a table and went plunk plunk plunk Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. With each it with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, up and down a scale for two hours on five consecutive days. Now, 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 brain 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 so I'm 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 in 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

that was I think that was done at 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 it 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 rest, 15 times 20 seconds rest, like 15 reps at a time for quarter of an hour, for three months. And they got 53% stronger. While they were doing that, a separate group of people, close their eyes, hands flat on the table, kinesthetic imagery. They imagined they were doing the 15 extensions and contractions,

but no movement at all. They got 35% stronger because this was, at the start, in the end of the study, they put their finger in a machine and lifted a wee 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 skeptical

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 and strength for 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, you know, 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 health to say there are so many different factors that play a role. But what you're saying, David, really, is really to me 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, because I wasn't familiar with some of that research, 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, 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 visualise

the night before they play they literally are visualising being on the tea 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

and while they're going when I did get into golf a few years back I would often do that on a Friday night before my rounds I would actually visualize and you know what? It makes sense. a difference. And I think this

and plays into this whole idea that can the brain tell the difference between vivid imagery and reality? And it doesn't seem to in fact 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 top sports people, 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 physiotherapy alone. So there's a number of different ways the brain isn't distinguishing. Even eating,

the study 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 and 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. Yeah. 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? 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 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. 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 was playing tennis and so you've taken it up in your 40s and you thought you weren't very good, but now you're playing through the leagues and you mentioned visualization. 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 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 late since their teenagers. It's very unusual for someone to start playing for the first time in their mid-40s. So I started to really enjoy it because I realized 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 top spin 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 Dunblade officially 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 at 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 in the premiership where you get three points for a win one point for a draw nothing for a loss in unblane box leagues to encourage you to play you get one point for showing up

four points for a win win, et cetera. So I always got six points for playing six matches because it's four leagues of seven players. Anyway, so for two years, my average losing margin was six love six one. I hadn't won a single set of tennis and 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 of golfers, of, you know, from time to time explained how visualizations works, how you would apply it to your life, etc. 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 sign 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. Do you know, in all of sports, the tennis serve is the second most complex move in all of sports. Most people think it's 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 surf called the kick serve that's very, very difficult.

And I thought, I'm going to visualize. So I'd visualise 10 serves to one side and 10 serves to the other side every day. Within two days of visualization, 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 were using imagining things that they were familiar with

like reaching for a glass of water if 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 of Andy Murray doing serving. I cut it down to about five seconds and I watched it 3,000 times. That's how to activate action observation. Not in one go. I printed out a little table on Microsoft Word. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, week one, week two, week three, week four.

So I'd 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 It's as if you're visualising. 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 visualisations of hitting the surf 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 let it 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. vision 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. 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 you, 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 visualize 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 your physical 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 back, your spine being straight, your shoulders relax, 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 to be like that than had you not done the visualization. Yeah, and 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 events. Yeah, it's an amazing feeling because I think many people in society do feel disempowered. Like we don't know what to do to improve ourselves, and I think just giving that little bit, it gives you confidence, it boost 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 pharmacy I wanted to turn around

side effect. Well, 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 therapeutics. If it's the effect we don't want, it's a side effect, right? So I guess it's just how we phrase these things. But let's go into it. I think it's an interesting idea. So what are? 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 are not doing, who are just behaving as normal. And you can track the happiness levels before and after. And you can do it in 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. 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 did with that chapter is I just tracked the different physical effects in the heart and the cardiovascular system

and even to do with inflammation and oxidative stress as you practice kindness because of how it makes you feel. 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, you know, is something called oxidative stress or production-free radicals. In one study I cited when scientists were looking at the rate of oxidative stress in skin cells, and they found

that if you introduced the kindness hormone to the skin cells put under stress, the levels of oxidative stress were substantially less. And there's similar research looking at how the kindness hormone, I'll call it the kindness hormone, 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, it's, 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's simply being around people we love who are empathetic, who are kind, who are compassionate. It has profound impacts on all those things. It's incredible. I mean, 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

at all life, and it's a repetition. And it's been known for a while that that generates a system-wide anti-inflammatory effect. It impacts part of the nervous system that controls something called the inflammatory reflex. So it basically 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. You know, so telomeres you probably explained before

the agglit little plastic shoelace caps called aglitz 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 a piece 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 maybe

and and it seems to be that a possible explanation is an anti-inflammatory effect in the vicinity of the 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 including 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 goods for us, right? That's kind of win-win all round.

You said that kindness is contagious. Yeah. Can you explain? Oh, I know. 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. some things. You sound like me.

I'm just saying, this is why this conversation could keep going on and on unless we saw thinking about rapping it at some point, but fire away. So a study between Harvard and Yale,

they looked at, 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 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 it's a feeling that 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 kind 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 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. So 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 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 some, it sounds so, you know, preposter's so simple. But 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 the matter to the person that you've helped who will then spread it out by three social steps. Yeah. David, I mean, I absolutely love things like this. 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 that phrase is, I don't know if it's Gandhi, I can't remember who it is, 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 roundties 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 breweryster. Hey, you thought, thanks so much. 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 the 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, you know, to your other interactions. But it reminds me a bit of what's something Andy Ramage said to me. I had him on, I think in November, he's set up this thing at this company, One Year No Beer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a really fun podcast I had with him, actually. Great conversation. And 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. And 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 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 and 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 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 realized. You know, if you're really kind to someone, it's pretty hard for them to start, you know, they're getting angry and resentful at you. 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, do you say you spend a lot of time teaching these days? Who do you teach and what do people say at the end of some of your courses?

A very mixture, mostly general public. Oftentimes, I mean, professional people, you know, 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 what I tend to talk to them about is kindness is the opposite of stress. And here's why. how, give a little tools, conferences, workshops.

I mean, last night I did a lecture in Glasgow on the mind-body connection and just get a couple hundred people come along and I do like in 90 minutes. So I do quite a lot of that, 90 minutes just giving a talk and trying to make it entertaining people there for 90 minutes. I've got to throw in a few jokes here and there. 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 that 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, society. I know. 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 and five plan because I think that five minutes on your mind, five minutes on your body, five minutes in your heart each day, I think it's the perfect well-being plan for any one of us, but particularly for children. You know, in schools, you know, they want to, they want to introduce well-being 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 talks for about 10 days, but I need to talk for about half an hour to kids and make it engaging for kids between the age of 6 and 11. And obviously, I won't talk about all kinds of things with them, but I think kindness, there are a couple of kindness practices in the plan. 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, actually about a dozen times I've gone into schools. Usually kind of local, 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 local schools in Dunblane where I live. I did another couple of schools. My niece 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 are are about to start or they're in the middle of a kindness project where the teachers have designed a little thing where they've to learn about kindness they have to be kind of 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 behaviour. And then depending on the age of the kid, understanding a little bit more about it. 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 us 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 colours your car

you know but it's just 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. You know, some of those things, I always see you can learn from everyone you come into contact with. 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. 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 come and 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 really inspired me

and said I decided when such and such a boy was not being very mean I decided not to push him down and that was a girl who was known for pushing people down 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'd 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 was it really melted actually did 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 because I think that's going to be a message that resonates with the kids. And frankly, adults, because we're just big kids, right? That, you know, if you don't want to do it because it's good for other people, do it because it's good for yourself.

I know. And actual fact that 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 along by the staff is how it makes you feel. The importance of it also been kind to yourself. I'm not trying to plug my books in but Lady Gaga bought one of my books and she bought it for all of her staff

and it was one of my kindness books and her mum in our office reached that charity Borness Way Foundation reached out to me and we had a few conversations Cynthia, her mum Cynthia Geminawate and I did a few 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 them

what happened is the kids at this school in Long Island had, it was coming up to Christmas time they'd use 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 to say to their parents, you know, can 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

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 the 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 the idea of noticing how you feel so I know I mentioned that grassroots practice early one in the episode that I didn't go and expand upon but let me just tell you what that what that game looks like because a podcast has got a lot on new lists and a lot of people won't be familiar with it

but essentially for a number of years now at our evening dinner in the chassis household my wife myself and my two kids sit down and 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 meal times 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 your family members and your kids

and your wife that you wouldn't otherwise have learned if it wasn't in that setting yeah 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 fratts on 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, it says, Daddy, why don't we had 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?

And it just, just what you said there, noticing how you feel when you do an acts 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. And just sort of luxury 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. And you know how, you know, that what you're doing for your children is altering the course of their life in a really positive way. I wish that I learned about kindness, the way what you're doing and the way some schools are doing now, 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 and 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 it's such a beautiful thing to teach 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. 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 just something that daddy told me to do. No, I feel it. I've locked it in. I feel it here. Wow, amazing. What a teaching for your children. David, I really appreciate you saying that because 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. 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, what do you think is the best starting point for them? Possibly the five side effects of kindness, simply because you mentioned 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 your books 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 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 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. I 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 and 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're going 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 does 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 to comfort zone at least once and one thing has to be completely anonymous man i i literally love that so much really hope you enjoyed that conversation do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them. It also helps you learn and retain the information.

Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward

to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday. You can sign it for free at Dr.chatterjit.com forward slash Friday 5. If you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, e-books and as audio books. which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode,

it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee

on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast. app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.