Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Paul Taylor on investing in stress

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

In this episode, we change the way we look at stress and talk about how to harness it with expert guest Paul Taylor.  Paul is an Exercise Physiologist, Nutritionist and Neuroscientist, and a former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer. He is currently completing a PhD in Applied Psychology where he is developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Newcastle. He is also the Director of The Mind-Body-Brain Performance Institute, where he delivers resilience, leadership and executive performance workshops to companies such as NAB, CBA, J&J, Oracle, SAP, PWC, BUPA, Medibank and the Australian Military just to name a few. In 2010 Paul created and co-hosted the TV series Body and Brain Overhaul and has appeared regularly on The Biggest Loser TV series. Paul’s BioAge software is used by a number of Australian and international health club chains and his latest venture is The Resilient Mind, an online program and app that is currently used by a number of corporations and has proven benefits for resilience and the mental wellbeing of participants. Paul also has a proven track record in leadership and dealing in high-pressure situations, through his former roles as an Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer and a Helicopter Search-And-Rescue Crew Member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He has undergone rigorous military combat survival and resistance-to-interrogation training and in 2012 he even became a professional boxer. In this engaging and thought provoking chat today, Paul talks about the positive benefits of stress while also introducing you to the concepts of: Psychological wealth The idea of healthspan as opposed to lifespan The benefits of Zone 1 & Zone 2 thinking to better handle situations and circumstances As well as the downsides of the age of entitlement and political correctness, and much more Enjoy this fascinating and insightful discussion with Paul Taylor. Paul's book recommendation: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Join the Get Invested community: And if you want to continue investing in your knowledge, join me and many other like minded investors in our Get Invested community right now. I send a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. It’s full of investment and lifestyle tips, my personal book recommendations, apps I use to enhance life and so much more. Just visit bushymartin.com.au and sign up at the bottom of the page … because this is just the beginning! Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

we are ancient bodies and brains in a modern world right and and one of the reasons we became the dominant species on earth was because we adapted better to changes in the environment and stressors than other species and that ability to adapt to stress has actually driven us on and a lot of people talk about resilience and bouncing back from stress and i i think that that under cooks our potential we have the potential not only to bounce back from stress but to actually adapt to it to become bigger faster stronger better because of exposure to stress and and this is something i'm very passionate about when youngsters whether they're rat pups mice pups and primates or humans when they are exposed to stress moderate amounts of stress relatively

regularly in conjunction with a supportive nurturing environment that actually trains the stress response system and then enables them to deal with stress better for the rest of their lives. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills and their money and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy, and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact.

Get Invested will help you to start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent, so that you can live more, work less, and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey, and ultimately, to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening, and now, let's get invested. Hi Freedom Fighters, what's your biggest challenge right now?

And what's the one thing you'd like to eliminate or avoid in your life? Is it stress? How stressed are you and how often are you stressed? Is your stress something that's occasional or has it become an ever-present struggle of your daily existence? And how does this make you feel? Anxious? Nervous? Constantly wired up and on edge? Do you suffer from a constant underlying feeling in your chest and throat that you're always under pressure and always racing against the clock to satisfy impossible and competing deadlines and responsibilities? Do you find yourself feeling easily agitated, frustrated and moody?

Are you often feeling overwhelmed, like you're losing control and you find yourself having difficulty relaxing and quieting your mind? Do you find yourself suffering from chest pain or feeling like your heart's racing? From exhaustion or trouble sleeping, from headaches, dizziness or shaking, from high blood pressure, from muscle tension or jaw clenching, from stomach or digestive problems, or trouble having sex. If you often feel stressed, then you're certainly not alone. Because stress has been dubbed the health epidemic of the 21st century by the World Health Organisation. and according to generally held views of the medical and mental health fraternity stress is responsible for sleep problems weight gain memory and concentration impairment apparently stress is also responsible for suppressing your immune system upsetting your

digestive and reproductive systems increasing the risk of high blood pressure heart disease heart attack and stroke and speeding up your aging process apparently stress can even rewire your brain, leaving you more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems. So most people have been taught to despise stress, which, according to conventional wisdom, damages your physical and mental well-being. And according to a recent study, nearly 60% of consumers globally said they suffer from stress, and 30% said it's most of the time. so what about you what's your view of stress isn't an evil that needs to be eliminated avoided and reduced at all costs now this has certainly been my view of stress for many years after my early

life crisis in my early 30s in fact in recent times my personal credo which i've got written on a post-it note on my desk so that i can see it and get reminded every day is time free me equals stress free me. I've been blaming stress as the major cause of all my issues from a host of autoimmune and inflammation disorders to the inability to unwind relax and do nothing without feeling guilty about it. But is it the actual stressors that are the issue or is it more about how I think about stress and react to pressure situations that's really at the core. Clearly, stress has been demonised by all and sundry. Stress has become our number one archenemy, something to be eliminated and avoided as much as possible. As a result,

stress has become the catch-all for all of our issues and, in my humble opinion, stress has become a crutch and an excuse to hang our hat on. Because as soon as we blame everything on stress and we put all our ills in the stress box, as if stress is something that happens to us that we can't control, we stop looking at how we react to stress and what we need to do differently and better. And it's also clear that we all define and deal with stress differently. It's not a universally consistent experience. One's person's view of something that's negative and stressful can be something that's merely challenging, motivating and actually inspiring to someone else. So is stress to blame for all our ills and is it as bad as it's been cracked up to be?

Is stress a friend or foe or perhaps both depending on the severity and duration of your experience of stress? Given the current focus on stress as public enemy number one I've decided to do a deep dive this week into the world of stress to question our assumptions about it, which has led me down a huge number of rabbit holes, resulting in some very interesting, surprising and attitude-altering results. So before I share this with you, let's start by defining what is stress. And according to some online dictionaries, stress is the feeling of being overwhelmed or unable to cope with mental or emotional pressure.

It's also defined as any type of change that causes physical, emotional or psychological strain and is your body's response to anything that requires attention or action. Now, when stress is put in these terms, it sounds a bit like a normal response. So, is it stress that's the issue or how we view it and how we respond to it? And this has really got me thinking. is stress something that is needed for us to adapt, grow and improve? For example, how do you build muscles? By putting our muscles under regular stress.

Conversely, if we don't regularly put our muscles under stress through exercise, they just wither away. Now similarly, in the fields of biology and medicine, this is called hormesis, which is an adaptive response of cells and organisms to intermittent stress. Examples in this sphere include exercise, dietary energy restriction and exposures to low doses of certain phytochemicals. So in biology, exposure to stressors may render an organism more resistant to higher and otherwise detrimental doses of the same trigger. This adaptive hormesis response comes from the Greek to set in motion,

where the exposure to mild levels of harmful factors preconditions a cell or an organism in that it stimulates the activation of stress resistance mechanisms, thus fostering the cellular capacity of maintenance and repair. In this way, exposure to detrimental stress factors improves an organism's ability to stably cope with adverse circumstances. And as we know, all living organisms need to adapt to ever-changing adverse conditions in order to survive. So this hormesis phenomenon that describes an evolutionary conservation process by which a cell or an entire organism can be preconditioned, meaning that previous regular exposure to stressors protects against a higher normally harmful or lethal dose of the

same stressor. For example, treatment of bacteria with sublethal concentrations of antibiotics not only provokes the surge of resistant populations, but also induces a general stress response that contributes to elevated adaptability and survivability. So in this sense, stress makes us stronger. Now this reminds me of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his masterpiece The Twilight of the Idols, where he said,

what does not kill me makes me stronger. so perhaps stress may have its benefits and researching this further I stumbled across the work of health psychologist Kelly McGonigal who introduces us to a new perspective on how we all need to look at stress based on her research findings that she details in her great book The Upside of Stress that has the byline why stress is good for you and how to get good at it To put you in a picture, I'm now going to directly borrow and draw on her excellent work on reframing stress, and to set the scene, let me start by asking you, did you have a stressful day yesterday?

Now, based on McGonigal's research, globally, a third of people answer yes to that question, and interestingly, in the US, it's about 43%, and I would say Australia is very similar. now let me ask you that question in a slightly different way if you could choose how stressful tomorrow is going to be would you say you hope that tomorrow is going to be stressful I'm guessing that your answer is no this is where McGonigal's groundbreaking work on stress gets us to think more deeply about how we think about what the right answer to this question is supposed to be and more broadly what we think the relationship of stress should be in our lives. What do we think the role of stress is in our lives then? Well as a health psychologist like

most of us McGonigal was taught and trained to view stress as the enemy of well-being, the enemy of productivity, of happiness and of health and she spent many years trying to help people reduce their stress or avoid their stress but in the last few years she's fundamentally changed her mind about stress. And now she's on a mission to change our minds. And she starts by talking about something she calls the stress paradox. In her research, McGonigal came across a study that went to 121 countries and asked people the same question I just asked you. Did you experience a great deal of stress yesterday? And then they computed something called a stress index. And that's the percentage of people in any country that

said yes yesterday was very stressful and they conducted this data set about 10 years ago or more and more recently a group of psychologists got their hands on that data and asked another very interesting question does the country's stress index correlate with other indices of well-being like life expectancy gross domestic product or GDP global happiness or the satisfaction with people's lives and not surprisingly it turns out that it does but in exactly the opposite direction that the researchers expected. The results show conclusively that the higher a nation's stress index the greater the GDP and life expectancy and the more satisfied people are in that nation with their lives, with their work, their communities, their own health and the happier

they are. Really surprising. Now basically the research showed that the more people you have who thought yesterday was very stressful, the better it is for public health, the better it is for the economy and it's better any way you look at it. Now that blew the researcher's mind and it blew Kelly's mind when she saw it. It was not what anyone was expecting and so in order to better understand this odd correlation between stress and well-being the researchers looked at what other experiences seem to correlate with the high stress index and they found as you might expect that on the day that people found very stressful they were also more likely to feel sadness to feel worried or to feel angry that's how we usually feel about stress but a high stress

index was also correlated with some very interesting surprising things like feeling a great deal of joy yesterday. Like laughing a lot yesterday. Like saying that you felt a lot of love yesterday. Or saying that you learnt something interesting yesterday. And what the researchers realised is that the same circumstances that give rise to stress also give rise to these positive experiences and that's what McGonigal calls the stress paradox. That even though we experience stress in the moment as distressing and we often think of it as being undesirable in our lives and consequently we might wish for a less stressful life. But actually according to McGonigal's work stress can be a barometer for how engaged you are

with the things in your life that bring love, that bring laughter, that bring learning and that bring growth. That stress actually seems to go along with the things that we most desire. The love, the happiness, the success, the wealth, the satisfaction, and the meaning in our lives. So more recently, McGonigal uncovered that a group of psychologists asked a broad sample of people in the United States to reflect on whether or not they felt their lives had meaning. And while we're thinking about this, you might think about how you would answer that question.

Do you think that your life is meaningful? and then they gave people a whole bunch of other surveys to find out what's the predictor of having a meaningful life or feeling like your life is meaningful and amazingly it turns out that one of the best predictors is stress any way you measure it. So people who experience a higher level of stress in their life right now who say yesterday was very stressful those are the same folks who are more likely to find meaning in their lives. If you look back in a person's life to see how much adversity they faced in the context of their lives that also predicts more meaning in their lives. Even the amount of time you spend every day worrying about the future that predicts

a greater sense of meaning in your life and in fact one of the researchers main conclusions of their study on what what makes a meaningful life was that overall people who have a meaningful life worry more and experience much more stress than people with a less meaningful life so this is a really different way to think about what stress means that stress could be a signal that you're fully engaged in your goals in your roles and your relationships and you're facing the challenges that will also give rise to meaning in your life. And McGonigal thinks all too often instead, when the moment of stress is arising, we view that stress, whether it's anxiety, overwhelm, sadness, despair, anger, frustration, we view that stress as a signal

that either we're inadequate to the challenges of our lives, or we shouldn't be feeling stressed out. Or maybe we think that our lives have actually become toxic, that there's something fundamentally wrong with us or wrong with our lives and we might actually turn our attention to trying to avoid the things that give rise to stress. And that brought McGonigal to the next reason why she changed her mind about stress and her mission to change your mind about stress. Because it turns out how you think about stress and the stress in your own life plays a profound role on how it affects your well-being whether that stress is harmful and leads to things like depression and burnout and heart disease or whether the presence of stress

in your life actually leads to greater well-being and resilience. So what you're now hearing are two very different ways of thinking about stress and I want you to think about which one best describes the way that you talk about stress, the way that you think about stress, and the way that you relate to stress in your own life. Is stress negative? Something that needs to be eliminated, avoided, reduced, suppressed, and managed? Or is stress positive, helpful, and a good thing? Do you embrace it, accept it, and use it? Now it turns out that which one of these mindsets you hold plays a really big role in how stress in your life affects you. So researchers at Yale have found that people who hold the usual more accepted negative perception of stress and believe it should be avoided or

reduced are more likely to experience what we typically think of as the negative outcomes of stress. They're more likely to have health problems like back pain or headaches or illnesses. They're more likely to become depressed. They're less productive at work. They enjoy their work less. they're even more likely to get divorced. Other studies have shown that they believe this negative perception of stress may actually increase your risk of stress-related heart attacks and your mortality. But on the flip side, the rarer minority of people who hold a much more positive and accepting view of stress seem to be protected from those things

even when their lives are very stressful. They're healthier, they're happier, they're doing better at work, They're better able to find meaning in their struggles. Now, when McGonigal first started coming across this research, he was understandably deeply sceptical, like I'm sure you might be. And like you and me, this is how she thought about it. She thought the reason those few people on the positive side of the stress line are happier and healthier is because they haven't experienced enough stress yet.

She felt that if those with a positive stress outlook just suffered a little bit more, then they would join her on the negative side of the stress line, where we share the mindset that stress is really bad, that stress is really a problem. And the great thing about science is that you can test those hypotheses, and it turns out not to be true. McGonigal's in-depth research clearly demonstrated the protective benefits of embracing stress rather than trying to reduce or avoid stress. And this holds true whether your life is currently not very stressful

or extremely stressful, and whether or not you've had a relatively easy life or whether your life has had a lot of adversity in it. This positive stress mindset really seems to help. And most importantly to McGonigal, as someone who helps people be healthier and happier, research shows that when you tell people about the importance of stress mindsets and you encourage them to choose a more accepting and embracing attitude towards the stress in their

lives, they actually become healthier and happier and more productive at work even in very difficult and stressful circumstances. So now let's share McGonigal's mini mindset intervention that will help you to choose this more accepting and embracing attitude towards stress in the moments when stress arises, whether it's the anxiety, the anger, the overwhelm, the frustration or the sadness. and to give you that mindset intervention McGonigal shares a number of her favourite scientific studies that actually test this out in that if someone tries to take a positive view of stress

when they're stressed out how does that transform their experience of stress? She starts with a study that was conducted at Columbia Business School and in this study they brought people into the laboratory to prepare and then deliver a persuasive talk and the participants were told that their talk would be evaluated by experts in communication and they were going to be getting critical feedback on everything from the body language

and facial expressions to what they said and how they said it. And in fact when they actually showed up and started to give their speech they didn't know this was going to happen but the experts actually interrupted them often to tell them exactly what they were doing wrong. For example your body language suggests that you lack confidence you need to try to stand this way or you need to make better eye contact and here's what that would look like or you're using a really weak example

you need to come back with a better example let's just go back in your speech and try that again so as you can imagine this is a very stressful experience for anyone to go through but before they went through that period of receiving critical feedback and having to adapt immediately to that critical feedback, all the participants watched one of two very short videos about stress. And some unlucky participants were forced to watch a three-minute video

that started with a very demoralising statement that said, everyone knows stress is bad for you. But research shows that stress is even more debilitating than you expect. It also included everything that you usually hear about stress. And I bet you can guess what that is. Stress makes you sick. Stress interferes with performance. Stress will kill you.

It's a problem. You need to reduce it or avoid it. Meanwhile, the other half of the participants got the real positive mindset intervention, which again was a short video that started with a very different statement that went like this. Everyone knows that stress is bad for you. But research shows that stress is actually enhancing. and this video informed participants that your own stress response how your body and brain response to stress can help you rise to a challenge and can actually improve performance that stressful

experiences are actually an important part of life because they help us learn and grow that they can actually be an opportunity to develop strengths and choose our priorities so this is giving a very different sort of mindset that combines both the meaning and the growth that's connected to stress. In other words, the paradox of stress. And then everyone had to give their speech and get this negative feedback and adapt on the spot. And the researchers were curious whether giving people a slightly positive spin on stress would transform their experience. Now, the first thing to appreciate is that everyone in the study was stressed out. Public speaking really is nerve wracking for most people. In fact it's right up there with death and divorce as the biggest

stressors and understandably everyone experienced it as stressful. However the people who are put in the more positive mindset, the accepting mindset towards stress, they still felt stress but they also felt more confident, more determined, even more excited about the experience. And the researchers also looked at their physiological stress response. Now you've probably heard about certain stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol but there are a lot of hormones that the body and the brain release during stress and one of these is DHEA. now as a sidebar I actually take DHEA as a supplement since the burnout of my early life

crisis now most people don't know that DHEA is actually a stress hormone below your neck DHEA plays a role in being a precursor to testosterone and it helps your body get stronger from physical stress like exercise and its role in the brain is actually to function as a neurosteroid. Your body produces neurosteroids which is a hormone that helps your brain grow from stressful experiences. It helps your brain form new connections from new experiences so you'll be better the next time that you face a similar challenge. And in this study the participants who were put in the more positive accepting mindset towards stress actually released higher levels of DHEA during their talk and after their talk. They actually entered a physiological

stress state that makes it even more likely that they'll actually learn and grow as a result of doing something that made them anxious and was difficult. And getting that critical feedback in the moment and having to respond to it. Their bodies and their brains shifted into a stress state that would actually help them learn and grow. Now, the next research that McGonigal shares is a study of job interview stress. And in this study, everyone came into the lab going for a job interview for the job of their dreams. And the researchers were very interested in that feeling of anxiety and stress that happens right before you have that big opportunity

where you really want to impress others and nail it. And so they told some participants to do what most people usually do when they're feeling that kind of anxiety about their performance. So some participants were told to spend a few minutes thinking about how they were going to impress the interviewers. How were they going to show their strengths? How were they going to prove that they were the best person for the job? Meanwhile, another group of participants

got a very different instruction for that pre-interview and that high anxiety period. They were asked to think about how the job was connected to their values. they were asked in that moment of anxiety to think about the bigger context of personal meaning into that experience of anxiety and they were asked to think about how if they got this job it would be an opportunity to express those values why did they care so much about getting this job and what could they do if they had that job that was personally meaningful so they got put into that mindset of meaning while they were experiencing anxiety and again

in this study the researchers were interested in two things firstly their overall performance and secondly their stress physiology and just like in the first study this mindset of meaning didn't make people less stressed out they still felt anxious and stressed about the job interview however it turns out that the second group did a lot better in the interview and the researchers actually video recorded the interviews and then showed them all to unbiased raters afterwards who rated each each interviewee on different criteria and the participants who had spent a few minutes putting their anxiety into a context of meaning were rated as being more inspiring and more uplifting than the participants who did the normal oh my gosh how am i going to nail this

mindset and the second group were also rated as being better potential colleagues they were the kind of people that other people wanted to work with and wanted to hire. They felt inspired by them. And in terms of their stress physiology, in this study, the researchers were interested in cortisol levels. Because cortisol is a stress hormone that's mostly associated with burnout, especially in the workplace. So people who have a stress response as characterized by higher levels of cortisol are at a greater risk of things like depression, fatigue and burnout and all those things that we want to avoid when we want to thrive in the workplace or thrive in roles that are important to us. Now in the study the participants who took that mindset of meaning

they actually released lower levels of cortisol during the interview and before the interview despite the fact that they were still anxious and they were still stressed. so they had a healthier physiological stress response without suppressing the stress or reducing the stress they didn't reduce and they didn't avoid the stress they managed to transform that stress by bringing in a mindset of meaning now the last mindset intervention that McGonigal uses as an example is a very different kind of stress study in this study people came into the experiment and they were asked to spend a few moments trying to think of an experience in their lives that was difficult that was still really painful to think about and they were asked

to reflect on that painful experience and some participants were asked to think about it in the way that we usually ruminate on painful experiences just sit down by yourself and reflect on it but other participants were invited to think about it from a very different point of view for the next two minutes they were asked to try to think of the experience as an opportunity to grow to learn or to become stronger and if this was an experience that was far in the past would they take a moment to think about any benefits that might have been experienced as a result of going through that difficult and painful experience and during the two minutes that everyone was thinking about whatever this heartache or this trauma was they actually had electrodes attached to every

participant's face so they could measure facial muscle expressions and one of the first things they noticed was that when participants were thinking about something painful but they were doing it from a mindset of trying to see the good in that stress they actually had less activation of the corrugated muscles of the forehead which are the muscles that furrow your brow and flatten your eyebrows and that classic telltale signal of distress. Now they also had electrodes on the zygomaticus muscle which lifts your cheeks into a smile and those muscles were more activated despite the fact that people were thinking about a very painful experience and it wasn't just the face that was happier but the participants who thought about the stressful experience from a

benefit finding mindset towards that stress they also reported greater levels of gratitude of joy and of forgiveness and they actually felt less angry afterward having thought about it in this different way and when you compare that to the participants who were just thinking about the painful experience the way you usually do those folks were more upset they were angrier and they were sadder all the negative emotions and yet somehow thinking about the very same painful experience, but from a mindset of trying to see what stress this is as an opportunity to grow and learn, it actually transformed their experiences. It transformed their emotions. And the physiology that researchers looked at was something called heart rate variability. And heart rate variability

is considered the classic physiological sign of emotional resilience. And there are two different types of heart rate variability. On one side you have constricted heart rate variability which is associated with a lack of emotional resilience. The heart rate gets constricted in a narrow range and on the other side there is greater heart rate variability. It moves like a classic wave curve suggesting that someone is in a state of emotional resilience. Their nervous system is balanced. It's also a way that's consistent with the emotions of gratitude and joy. And the participants who thought about this painful experience the way we usually do, their heart rate variability was quite constricted.

Whereas the people who thought about the same kind of painful experience from a benefit-finding mindset, their heart rate variability actually increased. By making contact with that pain point, this was actually putting them in a physiological state of resilience and producing the biology of gratitude and joy so is this all starting to change your minds about stress it certainly has for me and it empowers us to understand that how you think about stress can make a difference and how that stress actually impacts everything from your physiology your brain resilience your well-being to how well you're able to do the things that matter to you

and the way you change your mindset is surprisingly simple as you heard in McGonigal's three interventions. So when you're feeling stressed out just make contact with that paradox of stress. Now let's return to the question I asked you at the outset. Are you hoping that tomorrow is going to be stressful? Now we don't actually get to choose whether tomorrow is stressful or not but I hope that if tomorrow is stressful for you that you might take a moment to think about the paradox of stress to recognize and appreciate that a meaningful life is also a stressful life and that you could reframe and use that stress not as a signal that there's something wrong with you nor a sign of weakness or a sign that you're inadequate in your life or a sign that your

life stresses are somehow fundamentally toxic and killing you but instead to actually use that same stress as a sign that something you care about is at stake and to take that stress as an opportunity to think about what you actually care about to view whatever the situation is as an opportunity to learn and to grow and most importantly to trust that you can handle a challenge to reframe negative stress as positive pressure and as you heard from the opening excerpt from today's episode, there's no one better place to help you to embrace the benefits of stress than today's special guest, Paul Taylor. Because when it comes to stress, Paul has developed the habit of running headlong at it and looking it squarely in the eye and giving it his middle

finger. He's willingly and continuously pursued what we mere mortals perceive as highly stressful situations in order to learn and grow better and stronger. So let me give you a quick rundown on his background. Paul's a former British Royal Navy aircrew officer who's undergone and trained to become an exercise physiologist, a nutritionist and a neuroscientist and he's currently completing a PhD in applied psychology where he's developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Newcastle. He's also the director of the Mind, Body, Brain Performance Institute where he delivers resilience, leadership and executive performance workshops to companies such as National Bank, the Commonwealth Bank,

Johnson & Johnson, Oracle, SAP, Pricewaterhouse, Bupa, Medibank and the Australian military, just to name a few. In 2010, Paul created and co-hosted the TV series Body and Brain Overhaul and he's appeared regularly on the Biggest Loser TV series. In 2010 and 2015, he was voted Australian Fitness Industry Presenter of the Year. And Paul's BioAid software is used by a number of Australian international health club chains and his latest venture is The Resilient Mind, an online program and app that's currently used by a number of corporations and has proven benefits for resilience and the mental well-being of participants.

Paul also has a proven track record in leadership and dealing with high pressure situations through his former roles as an airborne anti-submarine warfare officer and a helicopter search and rescue crew member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He's undergone rigorous military combat survival and resistance to interrogation training and in 2012 he even became a professional boxer. so during our engaging thought-provoking and entertaining chat today paul goes beyond the positive benefits of stress to introduce you to the concepts of psychological wealth to the idea of health span as opposed to just lifespan to the benefits of zone one and zone two thinking

to better handle situations and circumstances as well as the downsides of the age of entitlement and political correctness to all this and much much more and if you want to positively embrace stress by arming yourself and investing in your knowledge join me and many other like-minded investors in our get invested community right now i send you a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical self-health and wealth wisdom that our current freedom fighter fly to subscribers can't wait to get every month it's full of investment and lifestyle tips my personal book recommendations, apps I use to enhance life and much more. Just visit bushimartin.com.au and sign up at the bottom of the page because this is just the beginning. In the meantime,

enjoy this very informative and entertaining chat with someone that I could listen to for hours because there's just something about an Irish accent that just gets me in and immediately makes me smile. So I know that you're going to feel the same after this great conversation with Paul Taylor. Hi Freedom Fighters. Now everywhere you turn at the moment it seems like the whole world's suffering from extreme stress, burnout and anxiety

from this relentless wave of radical uncertainty where we're constantly being told that we just need to be more resilient. What does this really mean and what can we do about it? Well for those of you who've been listening to Get Invested for a while you know that I'm a big believer

that sustainable success in whichever way you define what success is, lies at the intersection of self-health and wealth. So today, we're going to delve into these often misread and misunderstood areas by discussing them with a mind-body-brain specialist who's turned theories into verifiable science using his special brand of what he calls pracademics. Now, Paul Taylor is an Irishman who was in the British Navy in Scotland

who now lives in Australia, which sounds a lot like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, mate. So I'm looking forward to getting in it. So let's get invested, Paul. Bushy, great to have you. Great to be on, actually. So, yeah, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, mate, I'm really looking forward to jumping into the chat.

I've had a chance now to sort of dig into a lot of the stuff that you've been doing and the Get Invested crew is going to love the wisdom that you've got to share. But, mate, to sort of kick things off, for those who don't know who you are, can you give us a rundown on who you are, what you do, and most importantly, mate, why you do what you do? Yeah, sure. And look, I think why I do what I do is probably linked into my past. So I went to university, but brought up in Northern Ireland,

actually from a mixed marriage, which in Northern Ireland has a different connotation than everywhere else. This is the Catholic-Protestant thing, isn't it? That's the Catholic-Protestant thing. And we were brought up as Catholics, but always lived in Protestant neighborhoods. Oh, mate, you must have a bulletproof train constitution right there, I would have thought. Well, yeah, so that was interesting growing up and certainly helps to build resilience, right? Which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit later on.

But then I went to university and then did a master's degree in sports science and then decided I wanted to do something a bit more exciting. So I joined the armed forces and the British armed forces and flew in helicopters, hunting submarines for a number of years, helicopter search and rescue, bit of combat survival and resistance to interrogation training and then left the forces and became a geek. So I'm now a physiologist, nutritionist, neuroscientist, doing a PhD in psychology, and work with a lot of different businesses around helping them with performance, leadership, and resilience. And I'm married with two kids and two dogs, so that's about me. Love it, mate. Love it. Well, we're going to sort of dive into that history journey a little bit, if you don't mind, sort of getting you to take us through where you've invested your time, your energy, and your money

and the highs and lows that you've had along that road and how that's led you to what you're now doing. And I've got to say, mate, I've got this fixed picture of you on my head because ever since I've been listening to you recently, you sort of remind me of the actor James Nesbitt, but the racing tadpole version. Mate, I don't know whether you've seen him, but your accent is, you must be from Belfast or something.

Same place. Yeah, we're both from Belfast. He's kept his accent as well as I have. I love it, mate. It's the best accent. I've actually got some Irish roots if you go way back beyond the convict days. Oh, right.

And so I got very, very warm to the Irish sense of humour and the Irish way of life, mate. So, mate, but I interrupt. So take us through as far back as you want to go and talk us through that journey in terms of where you invested your time, energy, and money and why you did that and where that got you to. Yeah, sure.

Well, I guess in terms of my time investment, you know, when you're a nipper, it's all about going out and having fun. and sport is something that I have consistently invested my time in and and that investment in sport kind of branched out a little bit into overall health and fitness and where I do invest probably more time than the the average bearer into my my personal health and fitness but I guess the other area I've invested a lot of time in is both travel and education so I took a year off uni travel around the world backpacking working different places a lot of third world

countries and got bitten by the travel bug and and actually found that the military was great for that not only doing a bit of travel in the military but you'd get a fair bit of leave which I used to save up and bugger off to a third world country just to get a bit of of of a lack of structure to balance out the structure in the armed forces and and then I guess when I left the forces i i came over here um got dragged by young aussie sheila it's kicking and screaming all the way as you can imagine um but then set up in in personal practice so since then we have jointly invested a lot of energy in our different businesses um and i guess that the money kind of follows that i've invested a lot of money over the years in my education and my wife does similar

stuff so we're both very much around that and we're we're pretty lucky in that our educational interests um are complementary with um sort of personal growth stuff so we're very much into the the health fitness philosophy side of things and we've invested a fair chunk of our coin over the years in the various businesses uh and then in property but all of our property investment has been in the family home so we've kind of upgraded that as we we've gone i think I'm on my sixth house in Australia and paid far too much money in stamp duty. But trading up, mate, trading up. That's it, exactly.

So that would be, I think, where I have invested my time, energy, and money, the major buckets over my life to date. And then, obviously, when kids come along, they change everything, right? All of your time, money, and energy goes into your kids. Yeah, dead right there, mate. Well, mate, I read in, I don't know where I picked it up, but I think you made a comment that your time in the British Navy was sort of, was it 50% fun, 40% boredom and 10% terror? yeah yeah flying in helicopters is an inherently exciting and and sometimes dangerous thing and and particularly um you know when you're operating off ships helicopters off ships

a hundred miles away from the ship hunting submarines and shitty weather it's pretty dangerous stuff and then um the last few years of my career i did helicopter search and rescue in the mountains and islands of Scotland, which by its very nature is both exciting and sometimes terrifying. What was the attraction into the Navy, but helicopters in the first place, mate? What dragged you there? Well, it actually came out of a bit of an accident.

And it's a kind of a, you like to talk about a failure that set you up for success. And this is one of sorts. I had wanted to join the Royal Marines and be a Royal Marines officer and went through all of the what's called the Admiralty Interview Board, where you do all of that, did all the physical stuff, got accepted. And there's only two batches a year, one in May and one in September. And I think I got accepted in September, but we're going to be the next May. So me and another a few mates went off traveling again. um and it was a couple of months before i was due to join in fact i remember i was in australia

working at the time and i got a letter and was letters in those days it wasn't phone calls i got a letter from my liaison officer apologizing profusely and saying that he had forgot to submit my forms and so i wouldn't be joining the may batch and me out of mind who was traveling with me he did submit his forms so he went home to become a Royal Marine and and it turns that my eye had turned 25 in June and therefore missed the cutoff because of age so I was pretty crestfallen you know everything I'd wanted to do was about being a Royal Marines officer and all of a sudden and that was gone through through no fault of mine and sort of an administration error um but because of that i i ended up um joining the navy instead so the the liaison officer very

apologetic and said look what you can actually do is you can join the navy as our crew qualify as our crew and then you can go and do something called your all arms commando course which is a sort of a short thing with the marines and then you can go and work with these guys and do all sorts of other exciting stuff um so it was through this apparent failure that i ended up joining the navy rather than the raw marines but you know what it ended up being an absolute blessing in disguise i think i had a a much better career in helicopters than i would have had in the raw marines so sometimes um these things have very significant silver linings yeah totally agree mate well when you jumped out of uh that uh what was the attraction into the and clearly it's a

and the never-ending journey for you around the whole mind, body, brain exercise. What led you into Geekville? Look, it was actually, it was, again, a confluence of events. So I had been doing, my secondary roles were normally sports officer, and I had started, when I was doing search and rescue, I'd started doing another master's degree in nutrition, just in my spare time. is a lot of sitting around and i don't want to waste it playing video games and so i did a part

time master's in nutrition and i started doing a newsletter um and i remember i wrote this article and and i remember one of the crusty old chiefs came up to me one day um and he'd said that article that you you wrote he said it had a real impact not only on me but on my family and i thought oh that that that was pretty cool and then around the same time uh eight mates of mine get killed in a helicopter crash and two helicopters crashing together that that it should never have happened and and i was pretty fortunate not to be in one of those helicopters and so when something like that happens you kind of uh well sometimes not everybody does but i i got a sort of sense of my own mortality and was at that time thinking do i extend and go full career or do i leave and do

something else and that's when i thought you know what i want to leave and do something a bit more worthwhile and it was that conversation with the chief that stuck in my head and i thought this is what i want to do i want to help people be better versions of themselves so that sent me on my path to geekiness yeah love it love it and the the i guess what i is rare about you uh is that you We live in this world at the moment, as I see it, where everyone seems to worship specialization, niching, differentiation, the whole individualism and that separatism that sort of comes out of that. Yes. And we go down these silos where we're only looking at a very small piece without understanding the big picture. What I sort of pick up with yourself is that you do take a really big picture, almost ecosystem view of the world and how it all fits together.

Can you talk a bit about that? Because I think it's a really important distinction for people to start re-looking at things in a different way. Yeah, and look, it was really because, you know, I started off as a physiologist and for me everything was about exercise. And then doing nutrition, I realized actually that's got a big impact as well. and and it was i think it was when i was doing that and you know you dive into the different systems of the body you know the muscular system the cardiovascular the respiratory the endocrine and the nervous system and i'm going i'm just looking at it going my god we are such complex integrated beings and actually when you look at all of the science most western science

takes a very siloed approach it's a newtonian cartesian worldview where we break things down to its smallest component parts in order to try and understand it right and and that can work very well in science but when we're talking about human beings it misses the fact that we are a complex ecosystem so i decided um that that i i need to become um familiar with lots of different areas that's why i then went on to to study neuroscience at postgraduate level and i'm now doing a phd in psychology which for me is the kind of the the last piece of the jigsaw um so understanding all of that i think is really important if i'm going to go and be an expert because there's so many experts out there you know we take the there's a massive mental health crisis at the minute

and and and everything's just all about um mindset and stuff like that and the psychologist you know they'll do talk therapy which can be really really useful for people but to think that your sleep and your exercise and your nutrition has got no impact on that you you know you'd be bonkers to think that so so that's why i like to take this ecosystem approach and with everything i do and and and part of that is is is learning how the body and the brain actually works and the the very strong two way interactions between body and brain so in order for me to do my job properly i i need to explore a number of these different silos but not only explore the silos but how the silos interoperate with each other yeah fascinating and interesting stuff uh and which i i want to sort of

dig into some of that uh if we can and i and i would sort of come around on a in a circle way to then hit head on the whole stress, burnout, anxiety sort of pandemic that seems to be engulfing us all. But I love one of the terms that I really love that you brought up is this concept of psychological wealth. Yes. I'd love for you to unpack what is that, what does it mean, and what do we need to be doing about it?

Yeah, so it's actually a term that I've nicked from Professor Ed Denier. But as long as you credit the person, then it's not stealing, right? Yeah, I do it all the time. Don't worry. Yeah, that's right. And I actually like to sort of take his stuff and develop it. But it's really, he came up with the idea that it's about, you know, how do we have this really healthy mind? How do we move beyond this disease model when it talks about mental health, right?

Because if you think about mental health and the conversations around it, it's a deficit model. It's either you have a mental health condition or you don't. And if you don't have a mental health condition, then you're healthy. Well, there's a bunch of researchers, Professor Ed Denier, Professor Martin Seligman, Professor Corey Keyes, who actually say, well, let's look at another parallel continuum, which is about going from just being OK to actually this whole concept of human flourishing. And that's really where psychological wealth comes in, where you have this mental vitality. And there's been a lot of research showing that it's not just about how you think, but there's a number of different things like your social integration, your social growth, you know, the relationships that you have in your life, being interested in the daily activities that you that you're actually doing you know feeling like you have autonomy a say and how you run your life that you have some environmental mastery that you have a sense of meaning and purpose you know all of this stuff together goes into the bucket that that's called psychological wealth and and it and the reason i really like it is

it's more of that ecosystem approach it's not siloed yeah i love it mate i love it because it's embracing the whole system and not sort of looking at things in isolation, which is where we get ourselves into strife. So sort of revolving around that then, how can our listeners enhance their psychological wealth, Paul? Well, if you think about the things that I just talked about, there are some things that are really important in your psychological wealth. The first one I want to start off is the two-way interaction between body and brain, right? So the brain controls everything that the body does, right?

And your mind, your consciousness arises out of the brain. But the brain slash mind is completely dependent on the health of the body for it to operate normally, right? And so what that means is that when we are physically active and we eat good food we actually are supporting um and we're building that we're laying the foundations for a healthy brain and therefore a healthy mind because you will not be psychologically wealthy if you are not having um adequate levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain serotonin dopamine noradrenaline endocannabinoids endorphins these are all um feel good chemicals

either help you to feel good or to take positive action and actually exercise is is the best way to influence all of those things right so so the body side of things is making sure that you're that you're active making sure that you're eating good nutrition that gives you the good foundation to broaden out your psychological wealth and and then it's it's looking at um how you are responding to your environment and responding to challenges and stressors you know do you have psychological flexibility that is is really key having that psychological flexibility and but then there's the whole heap of social stuff that's really important and and we know that social relationships are are hugely hugely important i mean this is the reason why we became

the dominant species on earth is because of cooperation and these social groups and and and when you become socially isolated like loneliness is the single biggest predictor of a whole range of different mental health issues from depression anxiety schizophrenia drug addiction and alcohol addiction loneliness is the is the one thing that you see that pops up across all of those things So that that social side of things and cultivating relationships in your life. And this is what I like to say to people, you've got to cultivate those relationships. You can't just expect everybody to treat you nicely. You've got to actually got to go and work on those relationships, whether that's with your spouse, with your kids and with your friends. And then the other thing is being really interested in some of your activities in life, being engaged in life. That's really important for psychological wealth. And we might touch on that particularly when people come around retirement age, that it's really important to be engaged in life. And then having a strong sense of meaning and purpose is the other thing that's really significant in that psychological wealth. Yeah, I love it, mate. It's something that you touched on then that I wouldn't mind digging into a little bit,

and that's you mentioned that our response to the environment is very important. Yes. Because everyone responds differently. I wouldn't mind diving in a little bit there because I sense at times that we've created this sort of insulated, artificial, isolated world where we're trying to prevent any exposure to stress or any exposure to things that don't make us feel comfortable. Yeah.

And I think at our long-term expense. So I wouldn't mind you sort of diving into that a little bit because I think it's something that we need to wake ourselves up about. Yeah. So, I mean, there's lots of artificiality around that we have created. And the whole idea of society, there's lots of cognitive constructs around that, right? But with that modern life, there is this thing, I like to say that we are ancient bodies and brains in a modern world, right? And one of the reasons we became the dominant species on Earth was because we adapted better to changes in the environment and stressors than other species.

And that ability to adapt to stress has actually driven us on. And a lot of people talk about resilience and bouncing back from stress. And I think that that undercooks our potential. We have the potential not only to bounce back from stress, but to actually adapt to it, to become bigger, faster, stronger, better because of exposure to stress. And this is something I'm very passionate about, particularly with young kids and the increasing amount of political correctness that goes on and, you know, not offending people, you know, not stressing people out. it actually robs us of really important biological processes like there's an abundance of research from animal worlds and now a significant amount from human worlds to show that when youngsters whether they're rat pups mice pups and primates or humans when they are exposed to stress moderate

amounts of stress relatively regularly in conjunction with a supportive nurturing environment that actually trains the stress response system and and then enables them to deal with stress better for the rest of their lives whereas when you're brought up in a world of comfort and an absence of stress and an absence of offense and an absence of of of just being out of your comfort zone those systems are not tested they're not they're not trained and then what you find is that there's teenagers that go out into the real world and young adults and the first thing that's stressful they have no coping skills and and it's not their fault it's it's that um well-intentioned parents governments and whoever they are and and who are intending to not stress

little johnny or little jill out are actually robbing them of really important adaptive responses in the body and the brain that will actually prepare them for the real world right so and this whole um seeking to avoid stress and and to embrace comfort is something that is in our biology and that's useful when we live in a highly stressful uncomfortable world but we're now plunked in a world where you can have pleasure and comfort everywhere and you can avoid stress that's not a good thing yeah totally agree and it's so refreshing to hear someone uh talk about that paul because i i just think we're in this over sensitive almost victim i mean we've got it so good in this country that we we just don't appreciate what we've got and therefore it

it appears that little things become big things that don't need to be if we have those adaptive skills that you talk about. I'd love to... And so, Bushy, there's one more thing that I think is a big issue. There's three things that collide, you know, our propensity to try and avoid stress,

our propensity to seek comfort, and then this new thing that has really come out from political correctness is an entitlement mentality. It's not just that it's a lot of advertising and stuff like that and all sorts of other things, but that people are entitled and that they think that they are entitled to a good life. They think they are entitled to happiness, that they're entitled to a good job, that they're entitled to be treated well and that they're entitled to not be offended. Now, some people will say, well, that isn't title. I completely disagree. That is a construct, a cognitive construct and a societal construct.

It's not the way the bloody universe operates. it's not the way the real world operates right and and the thing that really bring brought it home to me was watching one day a documentary by david attenborough and he was looking at ants and studying ants and and they they found it that these two there was two nests of ants that were a few hundred meters apart and one day a couple of the ants from the different nests bumped into each other and then all the messages went back to the nest and then all of these soldier ants came out right and started attacking they're starting attacking each other and there's one bit they caught on camera where one ant got captured by five other soldier ants from from

from the opposing nest four of them held it down the other one caught its abdomen right down the middle and then injected acid right into it right that's the way the universe works that's the way the universe has worked for 13 billion years well not quite that long because there wasn't life on earth that long but since there was life on earth bad shit happens to good people right and bad shit happens to good creatures and it's just the way it was and and i think and something i like to talk a lot about is stoic philosophy and and the the ancient stoic philosopher epictetus said everything in your life is in two zones zone one is the stuff that's within your will or within your power things like what we choose to have as our belief systems what we choose to be afraid of

but also our behaviors our actions and how we choose to react to our circumstance he said everything else is zone two and the key epictetus is when you're faced with challenges we must focus on that which we can control which is basically our attitudes and refuse to invest our energy in the stuff that we can't control and and i think that's really really important advice for now is to actually go, is this zone one, is this zone two? And I need to focus all my energy on zone one rather than playing the victim, blaming other people and raging at whoever it may be.

And that's all zone two stuff. We just got to get on with things. Totally agree, mate. It's, again, very refreshing to hear you say that. And I'm sort of a closet fan of stoicism myself. And I've only really touched the sides with reading Halliday's book on the challenges of the way. But it really does get you to recognise that embracing discomfort

is actually a very positive thing. Absolutely. So I would love to sort of get you to sort of unpack that a little bit more, particularly around this concept of, you know, the words I've heard the most since COVID are stress, anxiety, depression, and the throwaway line around resilience that gets tossed around. but it doesn't seem to mean much. And when it does, as you say, it's a siloed response

that doesn't really look at the overall picture. What are your thoughts on what we need to be doing, both at an individual and a collective level, to better embrace those things? Yeah, so at a collective level, I think it's showed a lot of stuff up. I actually, way back in March last year, it might have been April when the whole pandemic was happening, I actually wrote something on LinkedIn and people can go on to my LinkedIn profile to check it and check the data of it.

And it was an op order. So it was a military style briefing about COVID where I said that, you know, we all need to be rowing in the same direction, not pointing fingers and blaming and playing the victim, that this is our way out of it. And we've seen it between state and federal, between state and state. and and you know we're we're not acting like a community you know you go back to world war ii you know the way that communities pulled together here and all around the world whether it was um with the allies or whether it was with the germans japanese but that was a time when everybody pulled together and they made sacrifices for for each other i have found in this pandemic and and and I think part of it is is driven by by social media part of it is just just the sign of the times

we have become very narcissistic and very selfish and where people are just thinking about oh woe is me the friggin government locking me down this has happened to my business blah blah blah blah and and you know that that is all true and it and it happened to me as well but as I've said to people that the key to this is at some point realizing this is not about you it's about how you interact um with your your fellow citizens and it's about being a good citizen in times like this where we all yes we have rights but we also have obligations as citizens and and and when people actually pull their heads out of their bums and go actually rather than playing the victim I've got to think about who can I help? How can I pitch in with my community? I think that is the

stuff that not only will help us get out of it, but also that builds resilience. You know, a part of resilience is about leaning on others and helping others to lean on to you and acting collectively. You know, that is a huge part of it. And I think there's been too much focus on the individual. And there's been a lot of stuff talked about mental health and stuff like that. But I have been disappointed in that we're just highlighting the anxiety, the stress and all of that. And particularly in the youngsters, it's almost like we are priming them to think, oh, I'm anxious, I'm stressed, I'm depressed. Nobody's going out there and talking about the stuff that you should be doing to actually promote your mental health and to drive your own resilience, a lot of that personal responsibility. So that's some of the stuff that I've been very disappointed in from how we've reacted to this pandemic.

Yeah, 100% agree with everything you're saying there, mate. And I'd love for you to, on that very point, focus on what are the things that we should be doing apart from the collective helping your neighbour and being a good citizen, which is, you know, clearly something that's been forgotten given our narcissistic selfishness that you've so well spoken about. What are your thoughts then at the individual level that we need to be addressing in that regard? So, look, the nice thing about what the pandemic has done is it's kind of highlighted.

When you look at COVID, it's the people who have got underlying health conditions that are the worst affected, right? And that has actually shone a light on what we need to do to be metabolically healthy, right? You talk about self-health and wealth and that whole health thing. So we know from looking at COVID, there was a massive study done using machine learning where it examined, it ran through, I think it was 240,000 research studies done on COVID and found that the single biggest predictor of a bad outcome was having high blood sugar, right? So and this gets down to metabolic health. And that's both a part of exercise, that regular exercise, which has a massive impact on your gene expression and makes you metabolically healthy. every time you exercise there are changes widespread changes in the expression of your genes

there's turning on of protective genes both in the body and the brain and a dampening down of genes that can be harmful for us when they're or they're overactive and the other stuff is good nutrition just eating a good diet not eating processed crap you know eating like our grandparents are great, great, great parents, like real food. There is far too much focus on eating processed carbohydrates, sugar and toxic vegetable oils. And together, those things create metabolic mayhem and drive inflammation at a cellular level, drive up blood sugar. Eventually, often that's the last thing to go. But it's the widespread metabolic damage that is predisposing people to bad outcomes in COVID. So getting your diet in line, eating real food and not a lot of processed crap,

exercising regularly is really important. Having good sleep hygiene, you know, and going to bed around the same time every night, getting up at the same time every morning, having that discipline around the last 30 minutes no exposure to screens you know having a wind down routine all of those things are really important for our metabolic health and and having good levels of vitamin d that's the other thing that the pandemic has really shone a light on is that most of the deaths have been people with low vitamin d or vitamin d deficiency um and in this country we've we've actually been victims of the very successful anti-skin cancer campaigns, slip, slap, slap, or slop, slap, slip.

I can never remember the order of those things. But we have levels of vitamin D deficiency and suboptimal that are the same as bloody Scotland and Scandinavia where the sun doesn't shine. Which is scary, mate. I often say I feel like I must be an albino these days, mate, because you're right. We're sort of guilted into the fact that if we're in the sun for any more than five minutes, we're about to lose our lives. And you know what?

It's great for reducing your incidence of skin cancer, but it puts you at risk of every other cancer. If you have low vitamin D, like vitamin D attaches onto every single immune cell in the body, right? It is probably the most important of the micronutrients, vitamin D. It switches on hundreds of protective genes and it particularly plays a very strong role in our respiratory systems. But it also plays a role in our mental health and in our brain health as well. So, you know, we are supposed to be out in the sun. It's just that we've destroyed the ozone. Right. And so making sure you've got adequate vitamin D, that your sleep's good, that you're exercising well, that you've got good nutrition and that you have the right mindset of dealing with stress. Right. When you look at things, you mentioned the obstacle is the way that whole stoic thing of looking at stress as a challenge rather than a stress. When I was in the military, people didn't talk about stress. They talked about challenges. And it turns out that how you frame it is really, really important.

And the Stoics said that even when you have these massive challenges that you can't do something about, they just become an opportunity to sharpen your character or practice a virtue. Right. So if we take COVID, you can't deal with it. You can't stop the lockdowns that we've been having, particularly if we go back a few months. But you can use that as an opportunity to sharpen your character, to actually go out and help other people, to practice a virtue of tolerance and patience and these sorts of things. So it's our ability to choose how we react. And Viktor Frankl, who's a bit of a personal hero of mine, he was in the Second World War. He was a psychiatrist who got imprisoned in Auschwitz. His logotherapy, the key tenet, he said, is the last of human freedoms, our ability to choose how we react to our circumstances, to choose our own attitude, to choose our own way. And I think that's really, really important as well as those other things that I mentioned.

It's one of my most read books as well, mate. I keep coming back to it, actually, because it's just very inspirational. It's a cracker. Isn't it? It's a cracker. Mind Search for Meaning, yeah. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah, it is awesome.

Well, let's dive in there a little bit because stress is, I think, the most overused and probably most misunderstood word that's floated out of the recent exercise, and then they'll bolt on or band-aid anxiety and burnout and everything else around it. But let's go a little bit deeper on the whole stress piece, if you don't mind, because... I'd love to. Yeah, I just, you know, sort of nailing in on your point there around the fact that there's this stress avoidance thing, but without recognising the downside of, you know, the sort of the neuro pathways that we develop in responding to stress

and how that then bulletproofs us to some degree to being able to handle more down the track. Can you sort of expand on some of that? Because I think this is where that distinction between the victim and the opportunist comes into play in terms of how we actually, as you say, frame stress in our own mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, absolutely. And it's a hugely important topic. So to understand the stress response, we've got our SAM axis, which is fight or flight.

As people will know, it's fight or flight or freeze. It's very fast acting through the nervous system. The nervous system stimulates your adrenal glands to release adrenaline and noradrenaline. And in the brain, there's an area called the locus coeruleus that releases noradrenaline in the brain, right? then if that stress is is either extreme or prolonged that we have a second pathway called the hpa axis that ultimately ends up with cortisol being released from from again from the adrenal glands but a different part of it now cortisol when it's released in the short term is is a useful thing because it it dulls your sensitivity to pain in case you get attacked and it it enhances

your focus and your concentration and it mobilizes energy it actually increases blood sugar so that you can fight or run away but if we think about if this is released over long periods of time because people are stressed psychologically or from work or all of the modern stressors and cortisol is being released at higher levels and it makes you fat it makes you sick and it destroys your brain function right now now cortisol actually comes back into the brain and and there's like this negative feedback loop that says okay we're dealing with it don't release any but when people's stress response system is untrained and and what happens is when they're when they're exposed to a lot of that stress that feedback mechanism doesn't work very well

right and then we get this runaway up um or if they're catastrophizing psychologically like what we now know is that you can sit here and ruminate about some bullshit that happened 20 years ago or catastrophize about what might happen next week next month next year and you know we call those depression and anxiety in the extremes but that that sort of thoughts that ruminating or those stressful thoughts can actually change our physiology and activate these stress response systems right so people can actually think themselves into an unhealthy state and that releases inflammation at a cellular level and it's just bad juju but when we are exposed and particularly some of the research is coming out about the framing of that stress that if you're

telling yourself that this is a challenge that you want to go and meet it can actually tweak that how your body actually responds physiologically to that right and and and then when you're exposing yourself to stress with adequate recovery and that's really really important because a lot of people don't recover well. And then your stress response system starts to be trained in that it can activate really quickly, which is a good thing. Now, anxious people also activate their stress response systems really quickly. The problem with them is they have an inability to turn it off. And particularly when we look at special forces soldiers or military survival training like I did, where they actually measure people's hormones during it, it is the ability to

extinguish the stress response system that underpins resilient individuals, right? I can turn it on quickly when there's something has happened around me and I'm not quite sure if that's a threat or not, but as soon as I realize it's not a threat or the threat has passed, I turn it off really, really quickly. That is an efficient trained stress response system. What we, a lot of people have is a stress response system that hasn't been trained and so that doesn't adapt well whenever it's exposed to stress and and can go on this runaway up particularly if they introduce this victim mindset and stuff like that so that's i think where we go wrong and and and what we can what we can actually do about it and and you know things like physical exercise and

particularly the more intense stuff is a great way to train your stress response system and cold water exposure i'm a massive fan of every time at the end of your shower turn it to cold for 30 seconds that will actually help to train your stress response system believe it or not as well as in as releasing feel-good chemicals in your brain and switching on a whole heap of protective genes so there's things that people can actually do to harvest discomfort as well as then looking at stress with a different mindset having that challenge orientation and and and a commitment orientation where you're actually committed to to overcome it yeah i love it mate absolutely loving it are there other things uh you know in in training that stress response uh you mentioned

the exposure to cold and the old wim hof stuff which i've sort of had a go at but sort of haven't been that consistent with to be perfectly honest uh but but uh now that you've prompted me mate i'll get back into the 30 second cold shower routine at the end which will be interesting to see what it does for other areas of the life mate but uh yes but uh above and beyond that are there other sort of uh techniques that listeners can adopt that is going to assist them in in that stress adaptive approach that you talk about sure sure and so let's jump into a little bit of psychological responses that that that that people can actually have so you know that kind of zone one zone two thing i think is is really useful you know is this something that's within

my control or is it something that's not within my control and and then also when we think about our our just our own behaviors and our everyday choices is there's a beautiful um concept um created by a guy called ross harris and where he talks about towards moves and away moves so we and he's basically taken um the choice point and that that victor frankel talked about you know we have this ability to choose in between stimulus and response we get to choose how we respond so ross harris said that we in that choice we can either have a an away move or a towards move so when a way move is something that's taking you away from the person that you want to be or your goals and a towards move is a move that's taking you towards the person you want to be or

your goals and linking that to your values is really really important right so um you know when you're uh come up with a potentially stressful situation you can either go and hide from it play the victim that's in a way move or you can actually view it as a challenge and and bring your best self to try and deal with that situation which is a a towards move right but we have all of these throughout our life you know every time you are um hungry and you can have towards and away moves do i have the crispy cream donut or i have the healthy food right when you wake up in the morning and you're thinking i said i was going to exercise we have those towards and away moves pressing snoozes and away move and getting out of bed using your discipline and is it is a towards

move but it's when you connect it to your values it makes it actually easier to do so that that's one thing thinking about all of your choices as either a towards or an away move i think is a is a really useful tool and there's another useful tool that that i like to use a lot which is a catastrophe scale so when you're non-stressed you write down like what would a nine and ten out of 10 be really, you know, 10 out of 10 is watching your whole family get butchered in front of your eyes, you know, that sort of stuff. Because the problem is our amygdala that activates the stress response system is a bloody drama queen, right? It thinks everything's a 7, 8, 9, or 10. And we ended up getting stressed about these little things that when we use a proper scale are actually the

ones, twos, threes, and fours. That's a really good tool to do because it gives you an anchoring and it allows you that space to then go okay this isn't a 10 this is a 5 now let me just take a couple of breaths and think about what is zone 1 and what is zone 2 so i need to focus all of my energy on something that is zone 1 right now and so this is how we can combine some of those practical tools together and to help us to face those those real life choices yeah i love it yeah Something we haven't sort of touched on, but it's sort of become very much flavor of the month over the last few years is the subject of meditation. And everyone seems to be a meditation expert, and there's a thousand different varieties of what we call meditation. What's your view around that?

Look, there is a lot of good evidence around the benefits of meditation. There's also a lot of rubbish evidence, by the way. there's a lot of of of claims on meditation that don't stand up to um and typical scientific rigor so if you look at a lot of the research around it right all the claims about people saying stuff that that's not evidence that's not research yeah we need to do proper research you should have a control group um that that that that either have no intervention or ideally an intervention of the same time as as the the other group the active group right so if you're taking a bunch of meditators maybe you should have another bunch of people who are just sitting there reading stuff on

psychological flexibility or stoicism or stuff like that then you can compare okay does meditation actually work now there are have having said that there have been a number of good studies that show that meditation can have positive impact on areas of the brain, is really useful for handling stress. But there are a number of different types of meditation. I'm actually a big fan of breath work, of just getting people to do box breathing, Wim Hof breathing, resonant frequency breathing, where they're just completely focusing on their breath. I actually find this to be meditation on steroids because they're a mindful activity if you're focusing on your breath it's a mindful activity but it's also using breathing to control our physiology so it's

only taken our scientists about 3 000 years to catch up with the knowledge of yogis that certain types of breath work can positively affect your heart and your brain and we know that that's the case so i like to talk to people say look if you're into meditation awesome go and meditate and find your thing if you're not into meditation try doing some some breath work right and you can find these things resonant frequency breathing you'll find on the internet box breathing you'll find a wind off breathing you'll find that there are three excellent modalities and or you know i work with a lot of busy executives they're not really into the to the meditation and i say well if you're not if you don't get into breath work just read a novel at night for half an hour

That's a mindful activity. Or my wife actually likes to make jewelry. That's a mindful activity. Playing a musical instrument. That is a mindful activity. And I would like to actually see some research studies done comparing meditation to these other mindful activities where people are actually engaged and willingly engaged and getting into what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talked about flow state. I think you may have heard of that, where you are engrossed in your activities, where there's a high challenge and you have a high level of skill, like that brain state, that's the optimal brain state. And so I think we can get positive brain states by meditation and by engaging in other activities that we are highly interested in as well. Yeah, totally agree. And I've got to say just anecdotally, mate, I play piano and I also just do some, I just do a 20-minute TM meditation every day. Yep.

And if I actually sit back now, you know, in the context of what you just said, I walk away from both of those feeling exactly the same. Very calm, quite energized, in a much better positive place to take on the day. and yeah, I hadn't actually put the two together and it's probably part of the reason why I'm attracted to both is that it sort of just sets me up and it puts a smile on my face

and I'm pretty much ready to tackle anything once I've either jumped off the piano or I've just sort of turned off the brain for 20 minutes. Yeah, and it would be a fascinating research study to actually look at what is happening to the brain during those activities and what's happening to hormones when we're engaging in both of those activities.

And I suspect you'd find that they're either the same or quite similar responses. Yeah, interesting, mate. Yeah, well, I'm sure that'll happen at some stage. But there's another concept that I love that I know you've focused on and I've heard you mention that it's more important to focus on enhancing healthspan over lifespan. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. So lifespan is, hey, I want to live to 100, right? And that's all I'm interested in, extending my life. Healthspan is the amount of healthy years that you have. I would rather live to 90 and be out playing golf and socializing with friends one day and then go to bed and not wake up than live to 100 but spend the last 20 years in a wheelchair or not able. So that's the difference between lifespan and health span and and and a lot of people think about their lifespan but not particularly about their health span um and and and this is linked in to all the stuff you talk about in terms of wealth there's and there's a lot of people investing and doing all that what's the point of having all that money if the last 20 years are absolutely rubbish and you're

wearing a friggin nappy for the last five years you know i'm not interested in that stuff at all I'm interested in health span is how do you extend the roadworthiness of your body and brain, right? As much as possible so that you can enjoy and have a highly active, engaged retirement. For me, that's much more important than just increasing your lifespan. Or you don't have retirement at all. I love the expression rewirement rather than retirement. Yeah. Oh, look, look. And actually you picked me up on something like retirement can be a big killer. All right. And my father-in-law, I'll have to tip my hat to John McComish because he has always said you need to have a hobby.

Right. And he's 85 and he's got his own his own little hobby farm that he's out there working every day. He's always got projects on the go, building stuff. And, you know, he went to TAFE and did a pottery class in his late 70s. I did a qualification. This is the sort of stuff that people should be doing. Like if you like your work and I love my work, keep working. Don't frigging retire. Maybe reduce the amount of hours that you work so you can do some more pleasurable activities. But we've got to keep our minds engaged.

We've got to have a project like the best way to hurtle your brain towards Alzheimer's disease is to do the same shit every day, to hang out with the same people, to go to the same places. and just have lots of routine in your life. The brain needs novelty to stay young. When you're doing new things, meeting new people, going to new places, learning a new skill, playing a musical instrument, learning a language, you create new brain cells and new connections. And the beauty of neuroscience is that we discovered in 1997 that it was actually possible to create new brain cells as an adult. And we've now seen that people in their 90s can actually do it, right? And by the way exercise is really fundamental for that process and because it creates these growth factors that help but but um that that health span you know it's a combination of all the things that

i talked about is like if you smoke stopping smoking is really really important right minimizing your alcohol this comes from somebody who's rs and ex-military and likes a tipple but ensuring you have and three or four alcohol free days is really important and and just and you know minimizing the volume i think on the other days is key but then it's it's all about that mindset stuff and keeping your brain active but making sure you're physically active making sure you're eating a good diet with the very low amounts of processed and ultra processed foods and making sure that you've got really good sleep hygiene right and keeping up those social relationships you look at the blue zones around the world you know okinawa and there's place in

in southern italy place in crete place in california where they have the highest amount of centenarians and they are all physically active and they have very deep social relationships right and which is and they all have these hobbies as well which is really really key yeah i think the you mentioned a couple times already uh having done a bit of a research in that area as well it's those deep social connections that seem to be the the trump card and all that am i right absolutely absolutely the brain the human brain is fundamentally a social organ there's very interesting research but she came out yesterday i think it was yesterday i saw it um that that older people who get surgery to resolve their cataracts have a 70 percent

reduced risk for alzheimer's disease versus the people who don't get the surgery right and part of the reason there's two there's two it's hypothesis at the minute one is um that when you got cataracts there's less of the blue light comes in which is important for the brain but the other thing is when people have cataracts they don't see well and they tend to socially withdraw and it's that social withdrawal that hurtles the brain or that has a big contribution to hurtling the brain towards alzheimer's disease yeah interesting mate interesting well uh sort of circling around oh sorry on the other thing so if you've got dodgy eyes you get cataract get go and get surgery if you've got dodgy hearing get the best hearing aid that money can buy

and because when your hearing goes that also has a really significant impact on the brain in a negative way yeah i love it well i'd interestingly enough i've uh i've had my lens replaced in my because I've been wearing glasses ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and had them replaced recently and it was a couple of years ago now, but it's absolutely changed my life, mate. Yeah, there's a really awesome move.

Obviously, you're seeing it, but from a neuroscience perspective, you're actually protecting your brain against Alzheimer's disease as well. Well, I'm a mad, mad keen field hockey player and been doing it since I was 11 years old And once I had the lenses replaced, just with it being able to play sport without, you know, fogging up glasses or bloody bullshitting around with contact lens and all the other crap that goes with it, it's been revelational, mate. And without thinking about that flow on that socially, you're just more likely to want to go and do it.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, love it, mate. So sort of coming back around the healthspan piece then, what tips, apart from those you've already mentioned, do listeners need to start thinking about to enhance that healthspan even further? Yeah. So if we go on to the diet thing, I talked a little bit about the diet. Some of the research that's coming out is there are changes in the gut microbiome as we age that we think might contribute to the aging process. So making sure that you're eating a wide variety of foods is really important.

And a lot of people, as they get older, they eat the same foods all the time, and that leads to less diversity of your gut microbiome. A healthy gut microbiome is very diverse. So so making sure you're eating a wide variety of real foods, right? Real foods don't have ingredients. Real food are ingredients, right? That's that's the major thing here. And having having some fermented food like yogurt, cheese, kombucha, kefir, these sorts of things really good for your your your gut microbiome as well. And so that from from a nutritional perspective. And we've also I think one of the other things behaviorally that that that that and this is a big, big topic, but it actually plays into two of your elves. And I really like your three L's, self, health and wealth. It plays into the health and wealth bit. And it's this idea of temporal discounting in the brain that our brain will actually discount rewards that are further off in the future and put and risk as well and put more emphasis on present stuff. That's why it's really hard to put money into superannuation and sacrifice buying whatever it may be to do that, right? It's also why it's hard to force yourself to exercise and eat well and not eat the certain foods that you know you shouldn't be eating but you love because your brain is going, well, they're right here and right now, and having good health and a good health span is 20, 30 years away, right? So it'll discount that stuff.

So that's really important to know. And the way to overcome it or something that helps to overcome it is back to that choice point thing and getting clear on your values, right, that I value my health and having a good brain and having a well-functioning body to be able to take me later into my health span. well okay so if it if it's values then i'm thinking about i'm much more likely to do the exercise i'm much more likely to eat the healthy food and it's about trying to frame it in how it makes you feel straight away right and saying i'm going to exercise because i don't want heart disease doesn't work saying i'm going to exercise because i know i feel awesome afterwards does work right so a couple of strategies in there to to impact on that um that temporal discounting that we all have and then just from a nutritional perspective a couple of very simple things um as you get older and i'm in my 50s everything starts to slow down and metabolic processes

just start to become a little bit impaired when we're young they work really well and actually what most people don't realize bushy is that you have a pact we all signed a deal with our genes when when we were born and they are looking after us but we forgot to read the small print right and i got this from a friend and margie a man who's a molecular geneticist she said the small print says um the genes say i will look after you until you pass optimal childbearing age and then all bets are off your genes actually don't give a stuff about you they care about survival of the species right so after you go past optimal childbearing age for females they get menopause us blokes get andropause significant drops in our growth hormone our dha and our

testosterone right so understanding that that we actually have to work harder as we get older now a lot of these metabolic processes i talked about they rely on enzymes and cofactors that we get from our diet so i'm ensuring you got a wide variety of foods and i think any everybody over 50 should take a a basic multivitamin multi-mineral just to make sure that there's no holes that appear in those metabolic processes i think that is something that's very useful and i think probably taking some vitamin d supplements is a useful thing as well and and some fish oil they would be the kind of top supplements that i would recommend that people take as they get a little bit older to help with that healthy health span or enhanced health span well uh but i'm i'm feeling

better about myself because i i'm ticking all those boxes i just about rattle when i walk these days uh paul because i've just hit the old magic 60 mark and uh uh for quite some time i saw my old man who like many hard-working aussies he flogged himself to death basically and he spent the last 10 years of his life dribbling out the side of his mouth in a wheelchair because he'd totally ignored his health yeah and uh that was a massive wake-up call for me and it's like right oh i'm never going to end up in that position so uh all of those things you've talked about And you're right, it's bloody hard work. I exercise every day.

I'm still out there on the hockey pitch making a nuisance of myself. Good on you. Every year I'm doing it, it's getting harder and harder. But that makes me even more determined to keep doing it because I know that the minute I stop, unless I've got something to replace it, then that's when the danger kicks in. That's right.

And there's a beautiful saying, um we we don't um stop playing because we grow old we grow old because we stop playing right so it's either playing or exercise right that that that's it is we grow old because you stop exercising not the other way around yeah absolutely love that mate absolutely love it well look uh you've really given us some uh great wake-up calls there mate and uh really touched on the surface are some really important things we do systemically and this is the key point i think it's there's no one magic bullet in one that solves all problems you've got to do multiple things across multiple areas and keep doing it and embrace the difficulty that goes with it

because it's it's getting uncomfortable that's ultimately going to give us that much healthier health span that that you've spoken about so absolutely my mantra is get comfortable with being uncomfortable yeah yeah so true mate so true mate i'm going to switch in switch gear into what i like to refer to as the ambush series yes the bushfire lightning round with just the fast five questions that you always get annoyed with on every podcast uh to kick those off to share your words of wisdom mate what's your favorite quote and why yeah i've got a i've got a couple of ones one from professor frank booth the human genome has not changed in over 45 years the current human genome requires and expects us to be highly physically active for normal

functioning that that that's one and the other quote uh is from i read from marcus aurelius the roman emperor and stoic philosopher in his personal diary which is called meditations which anybody can buy and and it's two words memento mori and he would say to himself and on numerous occasions marcus memento mori remember that you are mortal and he said remember that you could die at any time he said remember that not to be morose but to remind yourself that life is a precious gift and that you should wake up every day with extreme gratitude just to be alive and you should use that thought memento mori to judge your behaviors and your actions that day beautifully said great motivator and a great way to start every day mate love that on the literary field

then you mentioned a couple of books during our chat but what's the top book that you'd recommend listeners have a read of and why? Oh, look, if they're happy to go a bit heavy, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, like getting into the mind of a Roman emperor is pretty cool.

The other one is one that we talked about earlier on, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I read it as a 17-year-old, and it had a profound effect on me, and I've read it quite recently as well, and it's just awesome. Yeah, it is a cracker. I read it every couple of years, mate, because it just reminds me that it doesn't matter what's going on, it's our response to it that is the key.

Love that. Now, this one's a little bit left field, mate, but most Aussies believe they pay way too much tax. So what's the top legal thing that you've done to minimise the tax that you pay, mate? Well, it's probably two things that are intertwined, right? so so one was setting up a self-managed super fund um i think that that is probably being the best single thing and i sold a business a number of years ago and and because i'd set up a trust system as well um i i didn't pay any tax on the sale of the business you know you get a 50 percent um um discount for owning it for a year yeah and you got a 50 percent discount um because it was a

an active asset in in the trust and then the the remaining 25 percent that i was going to pay tax on i pumped into my self-managed super fund and the government didn't get its sticky paws on any of it love it love it yeah that's that's using it to our advantage but uh switching into the investment arena for a minute i'm not talking uh necessarily investment in in you know the normal property or shares routine but just generally from the investment sphere what's What's the worst and the best advice that you've received in both of those? The worst investment advice was to buy shares in something called Shadow Caddy, which was these follow-along golf carts that it just went to rat shit

and I lost all of my money. That's probably the worst investment advice that I had from someone. I reckon the best was to invest in my education. And so that has helped me to speak, you know, getting those master's degrees, the neuroscience stuff, doing the PhD now gives you the, I guess, the kudos to be able to speak on things that I'm very passionate about anyway. and to actually you know it's helped me to be doing all of those things has helped me to be a better scientist and to connect the dots which has helped me to build my own career as a speaker but also to enhance my own health span as well so it's been a it's been a double whammy well and it's a never-ending journey of learning i think uh you know you're still doing your phd and i'm

still doing my phd and when i finish that i'll do something else yeah exactly i'm exactly the same mate the day i stopped learning is the day they nail me into a box mate that's it so uh and i love that uh last question then um and you'd have a lot of these i reckon but what's what's a and you might mention more than one given the array that you've got what's what's a personal happy habit or daily discipline or rewarding ritual that contributes most to your success today yeah look i think there's a couple of things um one is i i do gratitude every single day for the last 29 years actually since i met somebody in india with elephantitis and leprosy um and and that it just it really impacted me and i thought to myself just never ever forget this guy because what has he

ever done to deserve leprosy and elephantitis when you are perfectly healthy so be grateful And that has actually had a massive shaping on how I live my life and how I react to stressful situations. I always have this guy in the back of my head. Yeah, this is tough, but geez, it's nothing like what this guy had. So I think that that has sort of invested into a broader mindset. And so I think there's there's that and there's that continual learning and I think are probably the ones that have have contributed to my more more more of that investment in my health span rather than the wealth that that's the thing I think from a personal habit perspective. and and and the other one which some that my wife is continually surprised at um you know i said earlier on i marry some ex-military like a tipple and and and i don't do it as much as i as i used

to but but if i do give it a significant nudge um over the years i have a ritual where i have to get up early that morning and i thrash myself physically and exercise and then jump into either a cold swimming pool or a cold shower to get the badness out don't let one bad day turn into two bad days Love that, absolutely love that I interviewed a

I'm a mad Richmond supporter might have been for donkey's years and I had the pleasure of interviewing a famous Richmond player and coach and then president of the club Barry Richardson a while back and he said exactly the same thing if you had a big night on the Terps

then he was up at Dawn's Crack and he ran himself ragged because his belief was you have to pay the toll. That's it. Absolutely love that approach, mate. Mate, bringing it all to a head then, big final question. If I gave you a microphone that spoke to every single one

of the 7.7 billion odd people that are currently alive in the world and I gave you a minute to talk, what would you say? I think I would say that that we need to remember about our success as a species that that was joining together to work collaboratively it's about really being a good citizen and then it's about that personal responsibility of of actually looking after yourself um investing in in your own health

um i think is is really key but also making sure that you are a valuable contributing member of society yeah i love it but i've heard a couple of your talks where and i love the way you close it off with a a challenge uh that revolves around the fact that no one's coming yes i'd love you love for you to share that with us mate because i reckon it's a great great way to close yeah look i look i i normally say to people you know the end of the talk as a speaker that's supposed to be where you create a nice emotional connection between me and the audience and all that horse shit right but i'm not a motivational speaker i'm a realist and the realist in it says i i've got to give people the bad news and the bad news is that no one is coming

no one's coming to sort your shit out right no one is coming to use your words to help you to invest to be your best self to help you to be healthy and to help you to be wealthy it's all about the choices that we make and particularly the choices that we make consistently that's really the key yeah beautifully finished mate that's a great way to bring the door closed for those out there that have really resonating with what you're saying and I'm sure there's going to be

a lot of them mate and I'm thinking here about a lot of our corporate listeners who given a lot of the active work you do in the corporate arena they may want to engage you to assist them at that level how do they contact you

what's the best way to do that best way to do that is jump on my website mindbodybrain.com.au or listen to the podcast my podcast is the mind body brain project podcast love it mate look being very generous with your time uh love your sense of humor but i but i love the way you cast that humor in in really in-depth uh researched and validated uh claims is that there's a lot of people in this world who make wild claims without any validation whatsoever i i love the fact that

you are you've spent years investing in understanding the nitty-gritties of it so that when you when we're making statements you know they're backed up with by good science so um that uh is it what do you call it the pracademics pracademic pracademic and i i'm glad it's come across like that bushy because that that that's for me the most fundamental thing absolutely love it mate uh been a real pleasure to have a chat to you mate and looking forward to staying in touch thanks for having me on uh i've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation thanks mate If you get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au.

That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. so thanks for listening and as always dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow