Instant Genius - How listening to our animal minds can help us overcome stress and anxiety

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Did you know that according to some psychologists we have two minds, not one? The first of these is our regular, analytical mind – the part of us that processes language and is home to our ego – and the second is a more primitive, animal mind that responds to our environment in a more automatic, intuitive way. It is argued that learning how to listen more closely to our animal minds can help us to overcome stress, anxiety and trauma. In this episode, we catch up with psychologist and author Steve Biddulph to talk about his latest book Wild Creature Mind. He tells how our ‘gut feelings’ are a way of our animal minds trying to tell us something, talks us through some simple techniques we can use to help us be more in touch with our animal minds, and explains how simply being a bit kinder to ourselves is a great place to start. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, Kimmishning editor, a BBC science focus. Did you know that according to some psychologists, we have two minds,

not one? The first of these is our regular analytical mind, the part of us that processes language and is home to our ego, and the second is a more primitive animal mind, the response to our environment in a much more automatic, intuitive way. It's argued that learning to listen more closely to our animal minds can help us to overcome stress, anxiety, and trauma. In this episode, we catch up with psychologist and author Steve Bidolph to talk about his latest book, Wild Creature Mind. He tells us how our gut feelings are away of our animal minds trying to tell us something. he talks us through some simple techniques we can use to help us be more in touch with our animal minds and says how simply being a bit kinder to ourselves is a great place to start.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Hello Jason, and lovely to talk to you and to everybody listening. So today we're talking about your book, Wild Creature Mind. So let's start with the obvious question then. What do you mean by Wild Creature Mind? Okay, now I should explain that with all of my books, they're never ever based on just on my thinking. My place in the world seems to be to take the best science that I can find and to make it useful for people in everyday life. And in this case,

the science that it's built on is especially that of Dr. Ian McGilchrist, who's a British psychiatrist and neuroscientist who really knocked the world sideways with his work on the hemispheres. So this is about in day-to-day life how to work with the fact we've got two minds. If I I can put it in a simple way to you, Jason, is that I'm talking to you now, and so you're talking back. And so those are our left hemispheres talking, and the left hemisphere has got a couple of regions that create language. So we're going left mind to left mind as we talk. Now, at the same time as that, over on the right-hand side, there is our kind of much more long-developed animal brain. And that is also on the job. And so that's handling things that are more complex,

like the timing of when we speak, my reading of your face and your reading of mine. And for people who are listening, getting their sense of, does this chap make sense? You know, is he trustworthy? How do I feel about what he's saying? And so it's like we've got this wild creature right beside us that's actually doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting. But we generally don't acknowledge it. And so it becomes a bit kind of estranged from our functioning, and that's what leads to very poor mental health in the long term. Yeah, so before we get into the sort of meat of that, in the book, you mentioned some of these common myths about left side, right side. So can we go through those? So the big one maybe

is left side rational, right side emotional. So where did that come from? Yes. Well, when I was a psychologist unit in the 1970s, there was a big rush of interest because very clearly we have two hemispheres. Our brain will open up like a sharing an orange with your children. You know, you peel it and then you just break, it just comes apart. And so does the human cortex incredibly. And so people were saying, why is that? And the fact that the two sides are very, very different in structure, even in the neurotransmitters and so on. What happened was that people jump to conclusions about it. They said, okay, well, one side must be rational and the other side emotional. And in fact, as we now progressed into having brain scanning and fMRI technology and just a

whole lot more study, it turned out that it was far from the case that our left hemisphere certainly is capable of logic and capable of reasoning, because that's what words do. But it's also incredibly defensive. And so it twists the facts to suit its picture. It's where our ego lives. It's prone to things like, you know, like slogans, like make America great again or stop the boats and things like that. And we've all seen the damage that slogans have done to here in the British Isles as well as around the world. Also, it's the side that gets angry. So the left hemisphere at its best is terrific, but its worst is a cranky, biased organ. And the right side, because it was evolved, and we can talk about this later, but it evolved

for vigilance. And so its nature is very, very open. And it's wired into two ways. It's wide into our memory banks and it's wired into our senses, whereas the left side was to do with excluding distraction and keeping focused. And so our wild creature mind is the name that I give it, is continuously taking in all the stimuli around us. It runs it past our memory banks in the hippocampus. Is this a pattern? Have I seen this before? Should I be worried on? not and then it signals us but because it hasn't got words the signals go not through you know two sides of your brain talking at each other which would be terrible but it goes through signals to our body and so we get what used to be called gut feelings or far in the belly or heartache or things

like that it turns out that these are you just found a very very intricate body signals and we can teach your listeners how to listen to these in a moment but that's it in a nutshell So let's have a look at that. How do we listen to these signals, these responses to stimuli? Now, there's a really good exercise for this, which I can do and your listeners can follow along. And I should say, though, Jason, don't you do it? Because it tends to make you lose the power of speech.

And so we can't have the interviewer getting lost in his own body. And so you just pay attention and I'll do it with the listeners. So if you're listening to this podcast, and especially if you're not driving a vehicle at the moment which is good. What you do to hear this voice is you choose someone that you know well or someone that you care about. And so if you're listening, just think of somebody that you care about in your life. And when you've chosen that person, picture them in your mind's eyes. So just think of what they look like and just picture them. And as you're doing that, go down into your body and into your torso. And what you'll notice is that there are sensations in your body that happen when

you think of that person. For instance, it might be that your heart feels a kind of a warm glow because you care about them a lot, but also maybe there's a bit of a twinge in your stomach or a bit of a tensing in your throat or around your heart that also might be there because of concerns you have about that person. And so everyone listening will have unique and up to the minute sensations happening. And the two things about those, they're in real time. And so if you had an argument with that person this morning that you're thinking of, your body would be registering that. It would be maybe tightening around the heart or clenching down in your intestines or something like that. And also, it changes. If you pay attention to it and have you got time, it's not a

static thing. It's a process happening in your guts and in your lungs and in your heart and in your muscles. And so this was the mechanism which animals used in order to live. A tiger in the forest didn't sort of stop and think, oh, you know, I'm getting a bit hungry. It doesn't use words, and its body simply moves directly from perception to action. Now, we didn't lose any of that in our evolution. We've got that. But it's a source of information which we mostly completely block out. And teaching people to listen to this is very helpful in dealing with anxiety and with trauma. And that's what I'm interested in, not just that it's gee whiz, but that it's a fantastic clinical tool to use.

So you mentioned their anxiety. I think that's a really common issue for a lot of people. So what's going on in our bodies when we are feeling anxious? Yes. Now, basically, again, you have a sure experience this, Jason, and I have for sure, and people listening, that anxiety is a very unpleasant experience, and it has a kind of frozen quality to it,

that it's not going anywhere. In fact, it's a kind of paralyzing quality to it. The word most often used with anxiety, and if you do a language scan, is crippling, crippling anxiety, and it's probably the biggest mental health problem on the planet. What we now understand is that we took completely the wrong approach. In the psychology world, we took a left-brain approach to what was a right-brain problem. We thought we could think our way out of anxiety. and if you lie in bed at night, wake up feeling anxious.

Most everyone has experiences your thoughts go round and round and round, and they don't get anywhere. In fact, you can make yourself feel worse as you go. And the thinking that began to emerge around this was that what's happening is that anxiety is your wild creature mind shouting at you to get your attention. It wants to tell you something and wants to take you somewhere. And because we fight that and we try to push it down, block it out, we have an unfriendly relationship with this part of ourselves.

And of course, it's a huge part of us. It doesn't stop shouting. And so we end up in this very uncomfortable kind of condition. So based on that knowledge, what can we do to help ourselves when we are feeling anxious? Yes. And so here's the strategy in a nutshell. I'll make it personal. If I wake up at night and I've got a big extended family and also I'm pretty concerned about the state of the world.

And so it's very easy for me to wake up feeling anxious. And what I now do since I've understood this and worked with lots of people around the world on this is I use, to begin with a form of words, which is, I don't know, Jason, if you've ever read Jane Austen or any of those books from the old days. Back in that time, people use language much more precisely. and there was a term people used. It was, there is something in me. For instance, there's something in me that yearns for the sea, or there's something in me that wants to give him a good smack in the mouth. That's probably not Jane Austen, but the implication is,

it's not all of me that wants to run away to sea, but it's there. And so when I wake up and feel anxious, or if people listening, if you have any emotion that you're not happy with, you say to yourself, not I am anxious or I am angry, because that has a totality. It's like all of me. You're sort of drowning in it. But if you say there's something in me that's anxious, then straight away there's a kind of spaciousness starts to happen. It's like it's over there.

I can sense it, but there's another part of me which is kind of looking on. And then since it's something in you, you go to where is it? And as we did in the exercise, you go down in your body, where does the anxiety live? And you can do this with children. It's a brilliant thing for helping children. Or it's in my tummy. It's kind of churning or it's clutching in my throat.

And so you then try to describe in words what the sensation is because it's always fuzzy to begin with. And so you try a word. You say, oh, like it's kind of churning. And then it kind of hardens a little bit. And you say, no, it's kind of like a little knot or a tangle. and it's throbbing or something. And what happens?

Because your wild creature mind has been ignored for so long, it responds to this left-brained connection. And what's happening on the inside, of course, is that there's firing across the two hemispheres. You've got your left and your right present at the same time. And so generally the physical sensation, nine out of ten times, will mostly just dissolve because it just wanted to get your attention

and it goes away. The other time, one in ten times, it'll turn into some kind of resolve in the sense of I'm not happy with this thing that I've been worrying about. I think I want to do something. When I wake up tomorrow, I'm going to take action, which is exactly what's needed. And so either way, it means that you're now integrated with the two parts of yourself and able to go somewhere useful. Yeah, so another thing that you talk about that I thought was really interesting

is the kind of sort of multiple views that we have of our same. you know, they might be critical and things like this. So how does that fit into this picture? Yes, again, and this kind of ties in with Buddhism and the best of the mindfulness tradition, which now is psychology is really moving towards. And it's taking a compassionate view towards yourself. And so we tend to be at odds with our own bodies very much of the time. And this is very strong in the British culture and Anglo-Saxon culture because we were traditionally raised to be canon fodder and suppression of feelings and criticism was how we raise our kids. And today, you know, my books are in a million British homes, you know, about raising boys

and teaching kids about their emotions. Sometimes that works. And of course, that's the first thing you do. You sit down with your child and say, you know, what's upsetting you? Can we talk about it? Often that's all it needs. But sometimes they just feel really upset. So the next step, the thing we would now add, which is to improve this relationship that you were asking about, is we say to them, you know, with everything that's happened at school today that's upset you, or with this nightmare that you've just woken up from, right now what's happening in your body? And that sends them inwards. And they'll be able to tell you, children are able to say, oh, no, my tummy is just, you know, really tied. Now, Jason, I had an experience not long ago of someone who was in terrible grief and

lost his wife of many, many years under very difficult circumstances. And he asked me if I could help and said he felt frozen. And instead of just talking, discussing it, which most psychologists would have done in the past, we ended up once we weren't settled in, just saying, well, what's happening in your body right now? And he said, oh, you know, there's this like a rock in my throat. I just feel like this huge, cold stone blocking my throat. and I sort of moved a little bit closer to him and just said, can you just let that be there?

Can you just kind of make room for it and notice what it's doing? And he said, oh, it's moving. It's kind of moving. And all of a sudden he just curled forwards and this great wailing sound came out of his throat. And he was sobbing. And it was one of the most moving times I've ever experienced. And it wasn't a five-minute cure, you know, But it was the beginning of him being able to do what men often not able to, which is to grieve.

And now, he could have spent, you know, 20 sessions at a psychologist talking about everything, but his body knew and it just needed to be given a voice. And I can see you nodding as I'm talking, and so I'm hoping this is making sense into the listeners as well. But it's a powerful ally. It's like a panther that walks along beside us as we go to. down the street. Fang's ready. Other times it's like a little scared hamster that we have to kind of comfort. Yeah, so you mentioned their nightmares, and in the book you have a whole chapter about dreams, something that I'm really interested in because for some reason I've always had

really vivid dreams. So how does that fit in? Yes, well, the science of dreams is now very progressed, and I got in touch with probably the best person in the world with Dr. Leslie Ellis in Vancouver. She worked with torture victims who, of course, could understandably have horrific nightmares in there. But what we know about dreams is it's kind of a clearinghouse for the day's events. And so in the kind of, as you'll know, if you've a vivid dreamer, Jason, they can be pretty bizarre, but if you can sit with them, they've got some relationship to what's been happening in the day and in the week. What dreams are doing is they're knitting together the unfinished tangle of our day and doing a neurological clean-out of all the tag ends that haven't gone anywhere.

And they're very important for brain health that that happens. A nightmare is simply when it just gets a, all, it gets a bit much and we wake up. And so in the book we use Leslie's methods, which is to, and there's quite a number of which probably isn't time for here, but when you wake in with a dream, you can follow a very simple process of again using your body, and it'll help you to kind of finish what the dream was trying to do. Normally, when you dream, it's amazing to see this on a brain scan, because normal sleep, both sides, pretty much inactive. When a dream begins, it's like the traffic starts on the M25 after there's been a roadblock, and everyone's driving again, and your

coppice callosum just throbs with cross-traffic. And so clearly it's both hemispheres that are working there. And if we can bring them into our conscious life, of course, then I'm trying to talk to you coherently, but at the same time, because I've been practicing this for a couple of years now, I'm noticing my body as well, and it helps me to stay settled and properly in rhythm with it all. And so it really changes you when you practice this. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day This mantra has shaped every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering,

balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio, creates a music, systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So another thing related to anxiety, at least in my experience, is insomnia and you just can't

sleep. So in the book, you mentioned this technique that I'd never heard of before called tremoring or tension release exercise. So what's the idea behind that and how do we do it? Now, there's a thing that happens in nature where you see a jackrabbit being chased by a mountain lion or jackaw or something, and it escapes, you know, with the skin of its teeth,

gets to its burrow, and they put cameras in the burrows sometimes. And what you'll see is the animal that has survived, whatever it is, will tremble. And paramedics, there's a story of a paramedic in the book and experience this, you know, well, just this, whole body shaking will happen. And we thought that was kind of something going wrong. But what is actually is it's resetting adrenaline levels

by burning off excess adrenaline through your muscles. And so you can start this up. There's some exercises in the book, which you lie in your back and you position your legs in a way that just makes someone get a little bit fatigued. And they'll just naturally start to tremble. And if you relax with that, it'll move into your abdomen.

and it's a little hard to describe, but in the book, we properly teach you how to do this. And so you start shivering and shaking. And it's a very good thing to do if you can't get to sleep. And it's remarkable how it just kind of, all of it. It's important to explain if you've got a sleeping part of what you're doing, or even if it's just a flatmate in the next room, because there's quite vigorous tremoring will happen.

And often memories come up. I had a memory of tonsillectomy. that was very badly handled when I was a little boy, just came right into my mind as I was trying this out. And so we can carry muscle tension from, you know, I'm 71, and that was 66 years ago. It sounds like you're quite drawn to that method, and so give it a go.

It's a fast track. It's not part of the main thesis of the book. I just put it in there because I thought, look, we'll give you every tool we can. Yeah, I'll try it next time I can't sleep. So we've been talking about trauma before, So, you know, what can we say about that? Yes.

Now, as we mentioned earlier in the podcast, your right hemisphere has access to the memories in the hippocampus at a much more detailed level. It basically, this is a site that remembers where you've left your keys. But it also remembers where you left your keys in 1997 as well. Your memory is astonishing. And so in the book, there's a story of a paramedic called James, and he's on the verge of losing his job. He's so overwhelmingly suffering from post-traumatic injury.

But he doesn't know why. And after a few sessions with a very good therapist who's very steady, she doesn't mince words, she's very, very steady and strong. And she just says to him, okay, you know, you're going well with this work. But right now, overall, where is it in your body today? And he describes where it is. and it's around his heart.

And as she sits with him and with that sensation, it begins to move upwards, and he just begins crying. And he has never cried before for many years because that's not what you do if you're a paramedic. And she just sits with him while he cries, but then she says to him, what's going on? And he says the name of a girl, he says Anita,

and she brings him back into his left hemisphere. She says, what's the story with Anita? and he tells her as a little girl in a pedestrian accident, and they got her into, badly injured, and they got her into the ambulance. And he told her, you know, don't worry, you'll be okay. And her mom was there, and she told her mom, she'll be okay. But of course, she wasn't.

She died of her injuries in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Because he's telling this, he's crying about it. And he and the therapist are now in a position to know what was wrong. of all the things that had traumatized him. It doesn't matter if you come from terrible situations, you know, torture or whatever. There's always the place that is the next place to address. And your right hemisphere can give you that next step. And so they work out a way for him to make amends with this little girl.

He did nothing wrong, but he felt, you know, he told he should be okay. Now, I feel like crying every time I recount this story. But he was, again, you know, able to get directly. to what it was, do something about it. And this is the incredibleness of the mind where there are answers in there. And our body is the root back to our right brain into our memories to know, okay, what's the next step and the next step as we go? Yeah, so we've covered an awful lot there, and we're sort of coming to the end of the conversation. So sort of, other than buying the book themselves, what sort of key points would you like the listeners to take away? Yes. Well,

To have a kindly attitude to your own self, we're just full of physical responses to the world. And we kind of thought that was a defect, you know, oh, you know, I've got a heartache or I've got attention or something. If you can change that attitude, say, okay, you know, the panther that's walking beside me is wanting to tell me something. I just have a little listen. Brains don't go wrong. They're beautifully evolved. And treat them kindly. and you'll find, you know, this is a tough world and it's not going to get easier.

So we need to be, you know, wholehearted and fully alive and have that power to go ahead and do what we know is right. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was psychologist and author Steve Bidolph. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, Wild Creature Mind. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or downloaders on your app store of choice. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

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