The Blindboy Podcast - Psychotherapy and Nutrition with Kimberley Wilson

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Kimberley Wilson is a chartered psychologist with a special focus on nutrition and whole body mental health Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dog bless you hell-bent Declans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I've received very little sleep as a result of a cuckoo that situated itself outside my window and did his cucking coo throughout the night. Initially I was kept awake by the sound of his call but then I started to feel sorry for the cuckoo because they're not supposed to coo all through the night. So I started to view him as a climate collapse cuckoo who felt confused by the temperature or some unknown magnetic force that caused him to coo throughout the night. Then having listened to him call for about two hours I stopped. I stopped feeling sorry for him and then began to resent the cuckoo. Then I felt guilty because it's just a bird.

Like, he doesn't know I have to go in and record a podcast. Doesn't even know what a podcast is. And then I started to gain respect for him because cuckoos got to decide their own name. A cuckoo's call was so annoying that humans just called a cuckoo what the cuckoo called itself. The cuckoo's name is onomatopoeic. In Germany they're called cuckuck. In Italy they're cuckoolo. In Russia they're cuckushka. But basically the cuckoo was like I'm a highly highly annoying bird and you're just

gonna have to call me what I call myself. And you're going to have to deal with that. And humans went, okay. And then I thought, well, guess what now, buddy? We're after creating climate collapse. And now you don't even know what time of day it is. So fuck you. We win.

Then I started to think about one of my favorite things about cuckoos. The practice of egg mimicry you see cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds nests right one theory is that when cuckoos evolved the place and time where they were there was a scarcity of nesting sites there wasn't enough trees or bushes or wherever for birds to build their nests. So the cuckoo evolved this ability to lay eggs that look exactly like the eggs in the host nest. And it reminded me a bit of the current housing crisis in Ireland and I started to think I wonder could people who can't afford homes like dress up as the children of landlords

like if you get rejected for a mortgage or you can't afford rent could some like theater group emerge where you train people to exactly mimic the children of landlords and then you just arrive into the landlord's house and be like how are you getting on da and then the real child comes in and then you argue with the real child and you're like sorry dunica but i'm dunica and this is my da and this is my house why are you here then the landlord has two identical children in his house and the landlord just goes i don't know what the fuck's going on here but i'm getting i'm getting out of this property it's haunted it's cursed i don't know what the fuck's going on here, but I'm getting out of this property. It's haunted. It's cursed. I don't know where this second child came from.

And then all the houses in Ireland get abandoned, and there's no longer a shortage of housing. And then I started thinking, Jesus, I can't see that working. I imagine people would find that wildly unacceptable, and it would quickly become illegal. At first, the suggestion of the idea would be rejected as absurd and ridiculous and all the newspapers would write opinion pieces about how ridiculous and silly and foolish this idea is. Some prick in the Irish Independent would auto-filate themselves by calling it bard-brained and then if anyone put it into practice and actually mimicked a landlord's child then people would get very angry they'd say hold

on a minute this is this is not only absurd it's deeply wrong it feels immoral this feels like stealing this feels dishonest and then the police would show up the Gardaí would show up with private security and masks and brutalize the person who tried to dress up as a landlord's child and then I started to think but we've got cuckoo funds the greatest concentration of wealth in the world a real estate investment fund which is just a giant pile of faceless cash they go to the housing market and pretend that they're people and then they buy houses by pretending to be a person they use their inflated giant wealth which is effectively a cuckoo's egg to price people out of the housing market and then exacerbate the housing crisis and then people

don't get to buy houses so if the housing funds can be cuckoos and create the housing crisis, why is it wildly unacceptable for humans to dress up as the children of landlords in a cuckoo fashion? But yet it's not unacceptable and is actually legal. And not only legal, but there's tax benefits for a giant investment fund to behave like a cuckoo. giant investment fund to behave like a cocoa. So by that point, I'd say it was about 4.30am and I was agreeing with myself in bed, angrily agreeing with myself. They're going, that's a good point. It's a really good point. I'm sure I can't get back to sleep then. I was so tired, I started to imagine that the cocoa outside my window was like agreeing with me, being like, my window was like agreeing with me being like good point good point good point so back to egg mimicry so they reckon cuckoos evolved at a time and a place when there was a shortage of nesting sites so this one species evolved and was just like well fuck that i'm gonna i'm gonna lay my

eggs in someone else's nest then it And it's going to become their problem. And what cuckoos started to do was. If a female cuckoo decides to lay her eggs in a robin's nest. Then she will lay eggs that look exactly like a robin's egg. But the thing is each cuckoo specialises in a different host species. So one female cuckoo will be like an expert at laying robin's eggs or another cuckoo will be an expert at laying starling's eggs then I started to think could you train a cuckoo to like lay eggs in in whatever color you wanted

eventually I ended up with could you get an an egg and then get a 20 euro note and basically use glue and glue a 20 euro note to the outside of an eggshell. And then get cuckoos to lay eggs that look exactly like 20 euro notes and then figure out a way to counterfeit money with cuckoos and then I started to think maybe the IRA should have done that because in the 1980s the IRA tried to counterfeit loads and loads of British pounds to flood the UK economy with so much fake cash that it causes the pound to devalue and And then collapses the UK economy. Which is a much nicer way of fighting the British Empire. Than acts of violence. So while listening to the cuckoo.

I was like. Yeah why didn't the IRA get a load of cuckoos. And train them to lay British pounds. And then I said. You need to get up. You need to get up out of bed now. And you need to just accept. of bed now and you need to say you need to just accept that you're not getting back to sleep and it's 5am and you just need to

get up now and deal with your day all right so I'm in here now and it's it's 7am and I'm recording this podcast so I have a wonderful podcast for you this week I'm speaking to Kimberly Wilson who is a psychologist who has a special focus on nutrition. Kimberly is an incredibly curious and fascinating person who's deeply knowledgeable in her field and we had a cracker of a chat. I'm gonna give her a little plug before we go into the conversation. She has two books published, How to Build a Healthy Brain and Unprocessed, How the Food We Eat is Fueling Our Mental Health Crisis. Also give her a follow on Instagram. On Instagram she is foodandpsych. So here is my chat with Kimberly Wilson. Okay, Kimberly, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast for a little chat. My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for having me. The first thing I really want to chat to you about is you're a psychodynamic counsellor. You do psychodynamic stuff, which I like. The question I have is psychodynamic means that it's rooted in sigmund freud but a lot of a lot of people are like freud is is old news and not relevant anymore why why what was it about psychodynamic counseling that um attracted you first and how was it relevant today yeah well so actually my training is i trained in three different modalities. So I trained in psychodynamics, in CBT and in person-centered therapy. And it's fair to say I use a kind of mixture of those depending on who I'm working with

and what I think their issue is and how they think. But I think what I find useful useful particularly with the type of patients and clients that I work with where if there are kind of which often involve issues with food and issues with food I think tend to be quite fundamental they tend to go back quite early because our our earliest relationships are predicated around the feeding experience. And so what I find particularly helpful about the psychodynamic way of thinking or conceptualizing psychology or the psyche is its real emphasis on early life and early relationships and how they start to shape our view of the world and create templates of relationships that we invariably repeat and kind of follow similar patterns. I think it's also really useful in thinking,

you know, what psychodynamics really thinks about is the unconscious. And so much of our relationships with ourselves, with food, with other people are driven by unconscious processes. We very, very, very rarely are thinking about our behaviors and making decisions in a very rational, deliberate, very cognitive conscious way actually we tend to make predictions we work on our expectations and behave accordingly so it's those kinds of things that i find really helpful and i think it's it's fair to say that um you know freud was a victorian he wasn't right about everything um and a lot of he was working with with the information that he had at the time, which has greatly developed and evolved since then.

But I think in a similar way to, for example, the way that some of the old Stoics, you know, Seneca was making very interesting observations about human nature that are absolutely still relevant 2,000 years later. I think when you have a paradigm or a philosophy that comes out of observation, I think you can still take really important information and data out from there. Because, yeah, sometimes I think psychology is philosophy when it finds answers. Absolutely. I think when we're talking about, and of course a lot of the early psychedelic thinkers and writers,

Freud was obsessed with archaeology and ancient Egypt and the old philosophers. And I think it's because they come from a similar position. They didn't have MRIs and they didn't have the tools of looking into the brain and understanding what was happening on a neuronal level. But what they did have was often hundreds and hundreds of hours of observation that they were able to think about and synthesize. And so it's not to say that everything is perfect and everything they say is right or even anything that everything that they said made sense but that there is a value it's a valuable and helpful way of thinking about some people and about some problems um something you said to me the last time we met was unbelievably helpful and eye-opening for me which was i was i was we were on stage and i was smoking

my vape and i said to you i like first off i'm addicted to nicotine secondly i i feel like i use my vape um to help with anxiety and then you said what what i'm also trying to do is to create certainty which was fucking amazing to i mean the thing is for me too because i'm consistently i do a lot of work on myself and i i have a lot of mental health tools and i trained in in psychotherapy so i try and allow myself to be open when someone says something like that to me, you know. But I found that amazing. It's like, yeah, I mean, a lot of people have problems with uncertainty, but I certainly have an issue with uncertainty. Could you speak about that?

Could you speak about someone using a vape to try and create certainty? Sure, absolutely. And I think if we start from the position that actually all human brains find uncertainty really difficult and really uncomfortable, your brain is essentially evolved, designed, specialized in prediction. That's what it does. We absolutely do not encounter the world in a moment by moment nature. It's not that something happens and I react and the next thing happens and I react. Each step on the ground I'm reacting to, absolutely not the case. What happens is that you build up a kind of data bank of information, past experience, whether that's with a certain type of cuisine or a certain type of person or you know even the the weather patterns you know you build up previous experience and then your brain is making predictions and your brain makes predictions essentially because it's a much more uh energy efficient way of of living if you were constantly reacting to things moment to

moment you would just burn through too much energy i heard that before from a neuroscientist i heard before that our brains are consistently trying to not expend energy constantly and that too is why what this neuroscientist said to me sabrina Brennan was her name, Dr. Sabrina Brennan. She said that sometimes our neural pathways will make connections that aren't necessarily helpful to us because that connection will, it saves energy. Yeah. Your brain is constantly trying to, because it's such an enormous consumer of energy, your brain uses up 10 times its body weight in terms of energy. So it's about 2% of your total body weight, but it's using about 20% of your body's calories when it's at rest. So running your brain is hugely expensive in terms of energy. And because it can't store its energy and because it can't storage energy so the

body can store energy in the form of fat your body your brain doesn't have an energy storage capacity wow so what it needs is a constant supply of energy but what that also means is that it's it's always kind of scared about a loss of energy you know so getting hungry going without food um is a problem for your brain and so a energy crisis is a massive problem for your brain and so it's constantly trying to save energy and be as efficient as possible and that's why we have things like habits you know habits are things that your brain doesn't have to think about whenever your brain has to think about something and make a deliberate decision it uses much more energy than to do something that's already automatic and so most of what we encounter in the world is prediction

um and and response to prediction and that's partly why uncertainty is so unpleasant when your brain can't predict what's happening it has to assume the worst the safest thing in our evolutionary history would be to assume the worst if i can't predict um that that thing coming around the corner is safe i it's say it's better for me in the long run to assume that it's a negative, that it's a threat, so that I can be on guard and be ready to run if I need to. And so coming back to you and your use of the vape, I think my suggestion was that you had this experience, as you always will, however many times you are on stage,'s a new audience you're in a new environment you and i hadn't we'd spoken for a few minutes beforehand but we didn't know each

other well we didn't know how this conversation would go or how we would get on so there was an experience of uncertainty there and festivals as well are quite uncertain as opposed to a regular gig loads of different things can go wrong at a festival like at a festival i'm worried about the direction of the wind you know and what that can do to sounds and yes it's a much more open experience people drift in and drift out there are other things happening there are people shouting about jumping or all of this stuff yeah um and so in order to create more of a sense of certainty we often develop rituals and associations so you know we see it with sports stars or athletes you know before they uh are ready to perform they might wear the same kind of socks or this or their lucky pants

or they might do a particular ritual um and that will be because a rituals help to manage our anxiety they give us is kind of a type of magical thinking and they help to give us a sense of control which actually ironically can improve our performance so the ritual itself isn't doing anything that you know crossing your fingers isn't doing anything but it's our belief yes exactly can affect the outcome and so for you you know having your vape you might have built an association there in the past of you know smoking calming you down or giving you a moment to take a breath often people use smoking as an opportunity to get away from a stressful event. And so that can create the association of, if I do this thing, I'll be calmer. I'll be more in control.

I'll be better able to cope and to manage. And that becomes a thing that you rely on. And that's the prediction that your brain then makes. If I have my vape with me, I will perform better. And so I need it there with me. vape with me I will perform better and so I I need it I need it there with me and just there taking it back to beliefs because I'm someone with um a history of anxiety so I'm very conscious of what we call safety behaviors so like I've I've never I don't consider my relationship with my vape to be unhealthy if I left my vape behind and went on stage, I'd be slightly uncomfortable.

But before, I did struggle with my asthma inhaler, which, to be honest, I don't really need. I don't really need it. I had childhood asthma. But about five years ago, if I didn't go on stage and my asthma inhaler wasn't at hand, I would then think I'm going to have an asthma attack on stage and I'm going to die. There was no rational medical basis to that. And to then take it psychodynamically, and this is what I love about psychodynamic therapy. When I was a child and I had childhood asthma, my father was quite an anxious man. And the doctors said to him your child has asthma here's what this means uh he may have an asthma attack and when kids have asthma attacks i need to tell you that there's a chance

that they can die now that could be a small chance but you know the way doctors have to say this yeah yeah so from the youngest possible age my dad used to say to me don't run too fast you'll get an asthma attack and die several like he meant it he was doing it from a position of both love and also managing his own anxiety but it became like don't go out and play soccer with your friends because you're different you'll get an asthma attack and you'll die and then I get to like 12 13 and it's like don't have a sleepover because you might get an asthma attack and you might die and then I carried that into adulthood with if you behave normally you will die and then I got agoraphobia I couldn't go to the pub I couldn't go to the nightclub and a huge part of my journey through training as a psychotherapist and also just being in

counseling was understanding that understanding hold on this is my narrative here this is something i've learned and it was a wonderful release to learn that to go back into my childhood and see i helped some i learned some unhelpful things about myself, the world around me and about the future. And I can relearn these things, you know? Absolutely. And that you had some beliefs about yourself and the world that were untrue. And so many of us have that. So many of us walk around with beliefs about ourselves and the world that are completely

untrue, but that we've never questioned and never challenged. They're complete reality to us. You know, and one of the most liberating feelings is when you see this unhelpful belief that you have about your self-identity or about other people, and you actually go, this is a construct, this isn't real i mean this is what i love about um you familiar with transactional analysis yeah a little bit the life scripts you know oh my god it's fantastic just seeing that i have written a script for myself based on things that i learned. And a lot of this is unhelpful. But now that I'm an adult who's fully autonomous and can make choices, I can

actually write a new script and I love the freedom of that, you know. Absolutely. And also that, you know, not a not just that you wrote that script, but often we have scripts written for us and handed to us. And so many of us are just, you are just on stage reading the script that our parents wrote for us, maybe even before we were born. And certainly in some cultures, the expectation about what a boy will be like and what a girl should do, and your position in your family, the eldest needs to do this and so forth. So we can be reliving and acting out scripts that actually we had no part in And reliving and acting out scripts that actually we had no part in writing in the first place.

But also to understand, and if we want to go a little bit more philosophical about it, that the self is not a concrete construct. Your notion of who you are is only static in as far as your self is embodied in your physical body. So your body is largely consistent. There's that kind of, I don't know if it's a myth or urban legend about the fact that every seven years your body is renewed because of cellular growth and cellular turnover. But your body is the consistent thing. But actually, you are what you repeatedly do. you are what you repeatedly do so and i find this so often people will say oh you know they worry about changing through therapy because they'll start to act differently and then they will wonder about how their friends and family will respond to the fact that they're behaving differently and they will say something like oh you know they're going to say you know either it's the therapy or or you've changed and you're different and there's

this kind of way in which we not just that we live out the same scripts but that we i i sometimes describe it to my patients as um as systems that we are all within our families, within a business, whatever kind of relational setting we're in, we are all kind of cogs in a machine, your gears in a big machine. And when one part of that system turns, it automatically starts to shift the behavior of another part of that system. And so we don't realize again, that unconsciously, we are just living out the same patterns because we've been given the same triggers and stimuli that have kind of engendered those behaviors in the past. But if you change your behavior and you do that consistently, you become a different person.

you do that consistently you become a different person and that doesn't have to be you know holistically you don't have to completely overhaul your personality but there's no such thing as the type of person who plays an instrument or the type of person who I don't know starts their own business a friend of mine years ago he he really wanted to be a photographer and he didn't have his his self-esteem was quite low and he came to me because I'm an artist and when I was saying to him look get a camera you can go to this course and I was laying out like this is how you become a photographer but what I slowly found is underneath it all he didn't believe that he was the type of person who was a photographer and i was like what do you mean and he's like well when you go to gigs and you see the person with the camera up front

and they're so confident and like as a photographer at a venue they're very confident with how they physically move sure they're focused on getting that shot and my body was going i'm not that person so it had nothing to do with like he loved photography he wanted to explore the artistic medium but the barrier was i'm not that person that becomes a photographer and i remember at the time trying to explain to him that's a myth that he's created for himself there's no such thing as a type of person who is a photographer and there's certainly no such thing as a type of person who isn't absolutely but that and we have this idea that it's there are certain personality types or certain um individual characteristics that are best for a particular

job or role and that it's just not the case no if you if you pick up a camera and you regularly consistently take photographs and you you know that becomes your practice. You are a photographer, you know, that that's, that's what, what it is. And I, I've said before and often to, to my patients, for example, that confidence is practice because I think people often feel that confidence is a personality trait that you're either born with or not. It's something that you are bestowed with or you don't. And if you don't have it, then you're destined to never feel confident in any situation ever, just because it's not part of your makeup. But actually, confidence is your brain's ability to predict a good outcome from any experience. So if we were talking about um public speaking we would never expect really you know the odd person perhaps but we wouldn't generally expect someone to get up on stage who's

never done it before and be confident about their ability to talk and engage with an audience it's just it's not something that they're familiar with it's not something that their brain has had experience with and it's not something that they're familiar with. It's not something that their brain has had experience with, and it's not something that they can predict a positive outcome from. But that's why you then start with, you know, talking aloud to yourself. I sometimes tell people, you know, talk aloud to your children, record it and play it back. And you over time increase the level of exposure. You talk to a few friends, maybe you do a small gig of 10 people and you build and you build and you build. And what you are able then to do, what your brain is able to do is to look back and say, oh, okay, I have this historic kind of actuarial data set

that says each time that I have been in this similar situation, I have had a good outcome. And it's that prediction of a good outcome that is what we call confidence. And I think when you're able to break it down like that, it feels suddenly much more accessible to people. You don't have to become a different person. You don't have to pretend. You don't even have to fake it till you make it, which is something that people often suggest about confidence. Just pretend that you're confident're confident no you don't even have to pretend that you're confident you just have to do it over and over and over again until your brain stops feeling as uncertain about the outcome as it did in the beginning and what i think is important there too and and also i can reflect

on it in my own life is what you're emphasizing there is the change in behavior like as i mentioned i used to suffer from agoraphobia and there's a venue in dublin called vicar street and when i was 19 and i had agoraphobia a band were playing in this venue and i really really wanted to see this band even though i had difficulty leaving my room I was just I have to do this I'm not going to get to see this band in a long time so I made the trek up to Dublin I went to the gig it was horrendous I'll be honest like I had about eight panic attacks I vomited out the side of the car on the way up like it really really was unpleasant but i did it because i loved the music so much and when the music was playing i was free i wasn't experiencing anxiety

but i now gig at that very venue and i'm the person on stage you know what i mean and i always use that as an example to myself of that's polar opposites right there. And it has nothing to do with, I'm not the type of person who can speak publicly. I just gradually exposed myself to things that made me very frightened. And what I, what always did it for me was art. Art was always the little, the light at the end of the tunnel. Art. Art was always the little, the light at the end of the tunnel. Like another time around the same period, I was gradually, I was attending counseling in college and I was gradually attempting, you're going to leave your room, you're going to go to the pub tonight. And it's going to be real difficult, but you're going to gradually, I'd be like, I'd need to be near a fire exit or a door. And I was like, that's okay. We're going to gradually I'd be like I'd need to be near a fire exit or a door.

And I was like, that's OK. We're going to do that tonight. And one moment that was a real breakthrough for me was I was in a nightclub, terrified, consistently at the cusp of a panic attack, ripping up beer mats, doing all this type of stuff. And absolutely terrified of going into the crowd. It was like I'd stay near the doors, but I terrified of going into the crowd it was like i'll stay near the doors but i won't go into the crowd and this was the days before mobile phones and a song came on and the song the song was the revolution will not be televised by gil scott heron i'd never heard it i'd know this was the early 2000s i'd never heard it and i was the early 2000s. I'd never heard it. And I couldn't believe. I'm like, this sounds like the 70s, but it sounds like hip hop.

What is this? I needed to hear what that song was so much that I walked through that crowd and walked up to the DJ and wrote it down on my hand. And it was the power of art. Art. I cared more about. I couldn't walk away and not know who Gil Scott Heron was. And each time in my journey,

it has been my love and passion and the meaning that I get from art that has helped me change my behavior and become a person who, I don't give a fuck about being in crowds now. I love it. See, that's a beautiful story and it makes me think of two things.

So one is the way that a significant enough motivator can help us to overcome what we might consider our personality traits or at least our kind of conditioned kind of conditioned responses and it's something that susan kane talks about in her book quiet about introverts and you know we have this expectation that introverts aren't going to be the ones that kind of stand up and make the speech but if they care enough about something actually that it's it's not impossible and it's not even um against their personality type it's not even unusual for an introvert to get up and put themselves in that kind of public, loud, outward facing space if they care enough about it.

And I think the other thing that your story makes me think about is the importance of behavioral activation. So one of the criticisms about psychodynamic therapy is that it's all about introspection. And I think to an extent that can be fair. Once you understand your motivations, once you understand about the early experience, once you understand about how the way your parents spoke to you and treated you affected the way you see the world then what you know the the knowledge the awareness isn't quite enough actually the thing that creates the change is shifting the behavior um because when you begin to act differently then the world responds to you differently yes then you can start to make different predictions. It's time now for a little ocarina pause.

We're going to take a break in the conversation and then I'll return to the chat with Kimberly in a few minutes. Check out Kimberly on Instagram at Food and Psych. And I'm going to play an ocarina so that you don't get surprised by an advertisement. Because sometimes the adverts are like a different volume to my podcast and I can't really control that

so if I play the ocarina at least you get a warning that an advertisement is coming an algorithmically generated advert I haven't I've got the actual

ocarina today haven't played it in a while bit high pitched you're invited to an immersive listening party But I pitched. Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca.

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it's called Small Bones and a Fist. You can get that wherever you get audio... Audio... Audiobooks. It's that cuckoo. That cuckoo has fucked up my ability to say audiobooks. It's cuckolding my tongue. Let's plug some gigs.

Let's do the contractually obligated gig plug. Not great at the old talking this week. In need of an old sleep. poor old blind boy needs an old sleep right what have we got here July August ah come on where the fucking gigs and again now I can't read dates

the 26th of the 8th 23 which is the 26th of the 8th, 23. Which is the 26th of August. The Saturday, I'm in the Cork Opera House. Doing a live podcast. Then on the 28th of August, I'm in Vicar Street. Doing a live podcast. Both gigs are going to be tremendous fun.

Then, fuck the rest of the gigs. I'm definitely in Belfast at some point, aren't I? There's a Belfast gig somewhere. Alright. There's gigs happening in the next few months, alright? We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. And everything's gonna be okay. Let's get back

to the chat with myself and the magnificent kimberly wilson i hear people speak a lot about manifesting you know and i'm not crazy about manifesting because it just i can see there's certain elements of positive good mental health practice underneath it but for me like over the pandemic i had quite my mental health was quite poor and when opportunities would present themselves to me in my work uh such as would you like to work on this record would you like to do this tv would you like to write this thing when my mental health is low immediately i think of the threat i think of what can go wrong of course but when my mental health is good and my self-esteem is solid then i'm like fuck it what's the worst that can happen let's try

and fail and then i take these opportunities and and success comes towards me i don't i wouldn't call that manifesting i just think that's a solid kind of mental health practice and keeping an eye on my self-esteem um one thing i'd like to ask you about because we spoke there about so when when i was when i was using music as a thing that was helping me to change my behavior and you mentioned their rewards what i'd be interested to know about there is we'll say extrinsic and intrinsic valuing music for me as a reward it's not material it has nothing to do with my ideal self it's very intrinsic to me it's about meaning it's about the core of who i am i don't care what people think about my opinion or taste in music this this is really deeply truly for me you know do you think that helped as opposed to financial reward or an extrinsic extrinsic reward or you know what I'm trying to get at I think so and I think it probably did so what we know about people who are extrinsically motivated so that they

are motivated to achieve and try and do things because of how other people will treat them or how much they will be paid and perceived and those sorts of things is that it the the victories tend to be quite hollow you know and those are the kinds of people who will they will be the high achievers they will they will be you know the ceos or they will you know have been promoted very quickly in their work lives or they will be you know the ceos or they will you know have been promoted very quickly in their work lives or they will be you know they're very successful athlete but they will also be the people that come to therapy and say i don't know why i'm so sad wow and the reason i'm kind of tugging at this too is i look at this through carl ro theory, you know, that these people, when your sense of value is about how other people perceive you, it can be hard to have a sense of self. Absolutely.

go on to become a musician but i i like that's not why i'm into music music is it's it's connected with my childhood it's it's where i find happiness there's meaning i love being generous with music it really and truly is who i am you know and i just don't think if if my goal at the time had been something like i'm going to the nightclub because I want to get girls I don't think that would have made me walk across that dance floor no and it would have made the foundations you were standing on incredibly flimsy and fragile because it means that you are kind of at the mercy of those external circumstances um and i guess just for any listeners who aren't aware of kind of carl rogers thinking on this and he spoke about conditions of worth yeah and the idea that we that sometimes our parents can give to us often you know or other carers but those tend to be the the real formative relationships um they

can give us these conditions of worth so i will be happy with you if you clear your plate or i will be proud of you if you get an a but a b plus doesn't cut it you know these and so we can start to take these in as what he called these conditions of worth the conditions under which i am a valuable person um essentially what we um consider to be kind of conditional love you know i've the affection is based on you fitting a kind of brief um or coming up to a certain standard and the issue with that in terms of developing what we call a sense of self is that you are constantly then contorting yourself to fit an external breach right um so you get into one relationship and maybe the person likes extroverts so you become an extrovert but then that relationship ends and you start dating someone who's a bit quieter so what do you become an introvert okay let me become something else

and so you lose either you a lose that connection to your authentic self or you never get the opportunity to develop it and so you kind of feel a bit unanchored and kind of set adrift um and and that can that's one of the real kind of significant mental health risks of growing up with or internalizing these conditions of worth and it makes me really wonder and be quite concerned about um the generation who are growing up uh with the example set on social media yeah because what i see and i could be wrong and i'm happy to be challenged on this but what i see is a very narrow set of uh conditions for success right so the top influencers those who get the the have the biggest accounts or the or the most money most endorsements, tend to look a very particular narrow, have a narrow aesthetic. And there are conditions for success in the West are getting narrower and narrower.

And so I wonder what that does. If that becomes your model of what it means to be a worthwhile person, A, does that automatically leave some people feeling wanting that they will never be good enough because they simply don't fit the aesthetic or they can't fit in in this way? Or does it mean you abandon your innate or natural talents and proclivities? So instead of exploring the saxophone because you love it, you get into makeup because it's popular. are going to be compelled how many young people are going to be compelled to abandon something that feels authentic to them because it doesn't fit what they're being sold is this very narrow set of conditions for success and one thing around that too is so i've done podcasts on rogers's theory and when i explain it to a lot of people, the messages I got were, oh, my God, this because it's a beautiful theory.

And they're like, wow, this makes so much sense. I'm learning a lot about myself in terms of these extrinsic things I learned. But a huge question I got back was people going. I don't know what my real self is I can really see these external things I know that I like it when people think that I'm successful or have a good job or that I'm physically attractive and I can see these things and I can see that they create mental distress for me but once I take them away to be honest I don't really know what the what the real me is and that was a huge response I got I didn't know how to answer that it's easy it I won't say easy

but it's it's simpler to point out the external things but how does a person find out actually this is who I am this is my real self yeah. Yeah, no, that's a beautiful question. And it's one that comes up a lot, at least in the people that I see. And I think there are a few things that probably need to be clarified. Because I think a lot of people think that they can just think their way to their authentic self. So, you know, they might say, you know, they'll come to therapy and say, yes, but how do I, how do I work out what I really want? You know, how do I decide between, say, a job that is low paid, but humanitarian or, a job that is low paid but humanitarian or you know a high paid job in banking to give a crude example how do i decide what is best and and i think what a lot of them are looking for is a kind of algorithm you know just an equation if this then that but actually, the path to developing a strong sense of who you are and what you like,

where you like to be, the kind of people you like to spend your time with, is trial and error. Which means a few things. It means, A, it will take a bit of time because trial and error takes a bit of time. It's not just kind of nailing down and getting, you know, researching, revising and getting the right answer straight away. So it will take a bit of time. And B, it means you're going to make mistakes. You are going to make some decisions that you would prefer not to have, or you're, you know, simply because they were, you know, suboptimal, you know, you're going to date people that ended up not being great for you. You're going to try a way of eating that ends up not working out for you. You've got all of that stuff. And i think the problem that a lot of people have with the idea of

trial and error is the lack of capacity for self-forgiveness and impatience you know so they can be very hard on themselves when they make a mistake or they feel that they've made a wrong decision or they feel that they're running out of time and so there isn't the opportunity to make mistakes or take their time or to do all these different trials and so you get this kind of compounding of the impatience and also the harshness the self-criticism yeah the inflexibility that gets in the way of actually the things that you need to do to then say oh i know what i like now like the only way you know that strawberry ice cream is your favorite is because you've tried chocolate and vanilla and pistachio and you have to do those things in order to know what what works best for

you but also something i find is but when you don't have a solid sense of self even being able to notice what's good for you and what's bad for you can be difficult like when my mental health isn't good for over the pandemic we'll say that was that was the last time i had a real bad time of it for more than a year the the cruelest part of that for me was i have i have a lot of tools i have a lot of mental health tools i'd use cbt frequently and because my sense of self because i didn't have a solid sense of self when i would try to do self-talk i wouldn't believe my own inner voice. And that's when it got like talking about habits. At nighttime, I'd close my studio door, you know, because there's expensive stuff in there and I'd lock it.

And when my sense of self was real low, I would have to lock that door maybe nine times. I'd have to check it. Now, it wasn't a compulsive thing. It was, I didn't have enough confidence in myself what I needed to say to myself was I'd be in bed and it's like you did lock the door just you remember yourself locking it you lock the door I can do that now during the pandemic I couldn't I didn't believe me telling me that I locked that door I had to go down and check over and over again and it was that

I it was a lack of a sense of self I would venture go on that I I guess I would conceptualize that slightly differently I wouldn't say it was a lack of sense of self per se and you know I say this having known you for like two hours so i'm sure that's gonna be the best that i get wrong um but i wonder whether what happens there and particularly during the pandemic is your experience of negative? So negative valence is the internal sense in your body. So it's a physical set of sensations of basically valence is pleasantness or unpleasantness. So positive valence is a bodily sense of pleasantness and negative valence is a bodily sense of unpleasantness right so crudely hunger takes us to a place of negative valence a lovely warm bed at the end of a tiring day

positive valence right and when we think about our cognition and our mental health there is a role for the body in both of these things right so um we know for example that certainly the theory of constructed emotion is such that your experience of emotion or what the researchers would call an instance of emotion is your brain's interpretation of your physical sensations in a given context in uh in conjunction with your the concepts that are available to you right so as a a very crude example and one that i used recently is you are you're standing on the edge of a cliff right and you've got butterflies in your stomach what is the emotion or what is the kind of cognitive experience you're having now actually we can't decide that without the contextual information if okay it's your first

time on the edge of a cliff and you've gotten there because through some kind of terrible error then you're likely to be feeling fear or panic or worry or terror right and so your brain will interpret those butterflies as fear, panic, terror. However, if you're standing on the edge of the cliff and you are a paraglider and you love paragliding and you've done this a thousand times and you're with your crew, then your brain will have different contextual information with which to make meaning of your physical sensations right so then you're likely then to interpret those butterflies as excitement yeah amped up ready to go right so does that make sense it does yeah yeah right so you've got the physical sensations the same ones as you've ever had but the contextual information the background information is different so when i'm thinking about you in your studio at the end of the day during the pandemic it what occurs to

me is a few things why certainly so across the board but certainly in clinic was a kind of sea level rise in anxiety for everybody right yeah because this was a brand new situation for the entire planet which meant your brain couldn't make any predictions about what was going to happen you know we didn't know how long it was going to last even those in authority didn't know how long it was going to last when we're in lockdown we didn't know how long that was going to happen for nobody had any answers so what so you have this experience of uncertainty and you have a physical sensation of of unpleasantness you know because your body's in a state of stress you're releasing cortisol cortisol makes you agitated so when i think about

you closing that door that you know locking up your studio yeah what i'm imagining is actually first of all you've got a background level of increased cortisol and stress very very much so yeah causing a physical state of agitation for you um and restlessness and listlessness but if you're not aware that that is happening at the time your brain will try to find something to hang that anxiety on. Wow. Right? So what your body was saying is, I'm stressed, I'm worried, I'm stressed, I'm worried, I'm stressed, I'm worried. And if you weren't thinking, oh, well, I'm in the middle of a pandemic, of course I'm stressed, I'm worried.

Then your brain will say, well, what must I be stressed and worried about? What must I be? Oh, it must be the door. It must be. Let me just double check. And that's why you weren't getting any relief from locking the door. It's because actually your brain was hanging the anxiety on the wrong hook. Wow.

That's amazing. that's amazing and but one thing we we didn't speak about at that festival was the pandemic because and this is the crazy thing about the like like i've been to a therapist like in the past year and i don't even like speaking to the therapist about the pandemic because I feel selfish. Do you get me? It's like, I feel that, like an example I used recently on the podcast was, imagine the pandemic happened to just one person. Imagine one person for two years had to stay inside their home because there was a localized virus in their house and they had to wipe down everything that came into the house and they had to wear a mask and it was just one person that one person would

be one of the most famous people in the world the whole world would go oh my god you did that for two years but all of us did that for two years and i feel as if everybody needs to have their little moment where they get to scream and say listen to how horrible this was for me but you fucking can't because everyone's been through it what i compare it to is grief like i i lost my dad when i was 20 and one of the hardest things about it, when you lose a family member, the people who you love and care about around you, who you want to go to to speak about it, that becomes difficult because they've also lost a family member too. So you have to be careful about how you grieve around someone who's also grieving. But with the pandemic, we're all going through it. Sure.

I hear what you're saying and i think that is a you know it's obviously a very empathic and kind perspective i suppose what i would say as a therapist and i certainly had this experience maybe less so with the pandemic and more so with um the george floyd um protests and and for listeners who don't know me, I'm a black woman. And I would have patients come in and be very anxious about talking about their feelings about it, or they would be very concerned about how I was responding to it. And whilst that is very kind and it's very sweet,

actually as a therapist therapist and hopefully this is something that all therapists are able to talk to their patients about it's important that patients and clients know that it's not their job to look after us yeah you know that we are what we should be doing if we're doing our best practice is taking sufficient care of ourselves to be able to bear what is happening and also retain mental space to take care of our our clients and patients now i won't pretend that that you know there were some struggles that happened during the pandemic but you know really you should always feel that you can say what you like and be who you are and certainly express your own distress what does it say about the client even for me like even for me what does it say about

i mean to go psychodynamic about it you're probably asking why are you afraid what are you afraid of by talking to your therapist about the pandemic i mean for me on a conscious level what i think it is is it brings up a feeling of selfishness i suppose selfishness is the big word and then it's like well what am i protecting this what am i protecting them from and then it's what am i protecting me from do you know what i mean yeah what it would be um so you might we might then say well what is what does it really mean to be selfish what were you told about selfish people how do you respond to people who we think of as selfish you know what what is the risk what is the threat of being perceived of as selfish is it for you that um you know one of the conditions of worth

for you was generosity putting yourself out always being available literally like that's my mother yeah yeah 100 that was like that was her thing was just she would just speak consistently about how generous her father was and the importance of generosity and doing a turn for people and being kind this was very much something that was instilled in me but then as a result to to to be selfish and not do a turn for someone was a bad thing so yeah you hit the nail on the head there yeah and actually i find that selfish and selfishness is something that comes up a lot um particularly and i guess maybe i see maybe three quarters of my caseload is women um but particularly with women this idea that actually it's it's kind of immoral you know it's a really abhorrent thing to be seen of as selfish

but then it becomes very difficult to disentangle actual selfishness from just a normal healthy recognition of having one's own needs yes you know should i always martyr myself in order to take care of somebody else or Or am I being selfish? It becomes very zero sum. And I think a lot of people struggle with actually the part where it's okay to set a boundary, to delay doing a favor if you really feel sick or ill or unwell or whatever, a doing a favor if you really feel sick or ill or unwell or whatever um and how often that becomes construed of in one's own mind as selfishness um and and the threat that comes with being considered a selfish person because when i try and work on this myself the the visual example i often use is you know when you get on an airplane and it has the air mask

thing and it says, if you're with a child, put yours on first, because if you don't put yours on first, you could both be in trouble. So meet your own immediate needs first, and then you can be of service to your community. And it's something I and do is is like if if i'm not putting if i allow my mental health go to shit then i'm no good to anybody around me i'm irritable i'm you know what i mean but if i'm minding myself then i'm i'm quite helpful to the people i care about who care about me yeah absolutely exactly that but also let's not forget that often people can mobilize the notion of selfishness as a form of control right so if i if you and me are sitting in a kitchen and i want you to make me a cup of tea and i say come make me a cup of tea and you say uh you're closer to the kettle you can

shit yourself yeah and i say oh you're so selfish what i do is kind of mobilize possibly and knowing you knowing how what selfish means to you um i mobilize a sense of shame in order to get you to do what i want and so we we have to also really well certainly i do as a therapist really be mindful of the way that things like selfish and and um and shame are mobilized as forms of subtle control because i think a lot of people don't realize that actually what they've been responding to is actually someone trying to get them to do what they want and have been kind of calling them selfish or mean or and actually they're not those things nowhere near it but that person is it's kind of manipulating them i see um one thing we haven't spoken about

food yet yes um what what is can you tell us about whole body mental health and the relationship with food and mental health sure um so what i call whole body mental health is the idea really the kind of underpinning philosophy is that you cannot separate your mind from the rest of your body um and i say that because i think a lot of the way that we approach both colloquially and just kind of to general public but also in mental health and medicine the way that we approach psychology is as if the brain is disembodied from you know the rest of the torso and you know your limbs and so when someone becomes mentally ill we we tend to come in with one of two approaches either talking therapy or medication which is a drugs that are designed to only work on the brain ideally right and and it's as if we imagine that

the blood the oxygen that is feeding your enormously hungry brain isn't coming from your lungs or that the nutrients that are feeding your enormously hungry brain isn't coming from the food you eat that is digested by your enzymes and the microbes in your gut. It's as if we imagine that your blood sugar, which feeds your glucose-hungry brain, but at high levels can impair the way it works, is nothing to do with the rest of your body. And so it's really, whole body mental health is about really helping people to think about the brain as being integrated in the body. And so I talk about how your mind isn't this ethereal thing,

kind of the way Descartes set it out as. It kind of floats around and is separable from the body, just hangs out to us because it's convenient. That's not really how it is. Your brain is an emergent property, but your mind is an emergent property of your brain. Your brain is a physical organ with physical organ needs like nutrition and air and exercise. And it is embodied in a body which then interacts with its immune system and its nutrients and stress hormones and other hormones and so for me it doesn't make sense to talk about your mental health without considering the contribution of your body and that includes things like the quality of your sleep the quality of your diet the amount of exercise you're getting your blood glucose levels you know any insulin resistance you might be

experiencing how do you how do you find people react to that kimberly because the thing is like that even 10 years ago that was considered holistic hippie dippy unscientific and only recently like we spoke about the professor john crying in ucc who's doing that work around uh the gut biome and mental health but i mean are you finding as a professional that you're you're being taken as seriously as as this needs to be taken when you speak about mental health holistically and not in a way that we'll say psychiatry wants us to think about it. Increasingly, I'm being taken seriously increasingly. Certainly when I was talking about this, you know,

I don't know, 2010, yeah, 10, 13 years ago, even other colleagues would scoff at the idea that what might be happening in your gut, you know, the work that Kryon and Dinan have demonstrated, what might be happening in your gut you know the work that uh crying and dining have demonstrated what might be happening in your gut might be affecting not just things like your anxiety but actually the morphology of your brain that your microbes have an impact on how your brain is built um you know people just didn't have much time for it over the years the particularly the gut health research and the gut brain access research has made a huge shift in people's openness to these ideas yeah but also you know

we know certainly in terms of cognition and certainly what i try to really focus in on in my second book is the role of nutrients in brain development yes because that is the fact if your if your brain if your mind is the emergent property of your brain the structure and function of your brain is essential to how well your mind is working and we know that your brain needs certain nutrients for proper development and that's when it becomes very worrying that certainly in the UK, only 9% of women of childbearing age don't have either a behavioral or medical risk for pregnancy. That we enter pregnancy in a state of poor or kind of risky health. You know, a third of women aren't taking folic acid, which we absolutely know to be essential for brain development.

What are natural sources of folic acid? Natural sources would be, so it comes from the word folate. Sorry, as in kind of the same root as foliage. So we're thinking... Or leaves and stuff. Yeah, leafy green vegetables. Spinach, all that stuff. Yeah, that's where you're gonna get your folate um the stuff you're talking about too is we live under capitalism and this is quite dangerous the capitalism we're speaking about

because well it's true because if you're speaking about something there such as the role of nutrients in brain development you can't now separate that conversation from class structures or marginalization as a result of race like like do you my feeling of it is that this is just really inconvenient to current structures of power yes and we've seen that right we we saw that during um at the after boris johnson became very sick um with covid and then he when he came out of intensive care and he had this kind of damascene conversion and he said he looked around and he said you know of my colleagues that all got covid i got most sick and he put that down to him being overweight he said, he looked around and he said, you know, of my colleagues that all got COVID, I got most sick. And he put that down to him being overweight. He said, you know, they were well, but I was overwhelmed and I was less able to fight it off. And that's when he decided that he would finally implement the child health and the national health strategies that had been, you know been in production since Cameron's time. And so he was ready to go.

And health campaigners and the public health nutritionists were delighted. It was finally going to be put into action. And these things could make a meaningful impact on the physical health of the most vulnerable in society. full impact on the physical health of the most vulnerable in society um because we know that that's who is most affected by restrictions on access to nutritious food and austerity measures and so forth and then when he was threatened his role his position was threatened by backbenchers because it didn't fit with party politics and party philosophy. Well, it's quite compassionate and socialistic. It's like the government now needs to take a responsibility

for the nutrition of the marginalised. If you do that, the very idea, and it was abandoned. Yeah. And so we see that in order to hold on to, in this case, an individual political position, but certainly in order to hold on to, in this case, an individual political position, but certainly in order to maintain a kind of political philosophy, even where the evidence, the objective evidence contradicts that philosophical position, the public health will become collateral damage to the philosophical position and and to the needs of the market the argument was made that uh we couldn't implement the strategy because um food

industry needed time to adapt yeah so the needs of the industry were put ahead of the needs of the population where we have really terrible population health you see unfortunately with this shit it's it's it's like under capitalism they still have to find this capitalistic horrendous argument to to make it work like one example i often think of and it's britain specific is social housing in britain the first social housing that was built in britain i think it was about 1917 or 1918 and it was put in place by neville chamberlain but the only reason the government at the time made social housing is they realized that the troops in world war one that the poor working class troops in world war one who would have come from slums and tenements of the East End or from

Birmingham they were literally far unhealthier than the people they were fighting against from France and Germany so the government said we're going to need proper housing and sanitation if we want decent cannon fodder here which is so fucked up you know and then social housing was built but the it wasn't about compassion unfortunately it wasn't about why not just be nice and give people toilets it's just no exactly and it's the i i go into quite a lot of detail of the history of public health policy and the objections to it in the book. But what it's ended up doing is that it means that instead of making the compassionate argument for intervention in public health policy, we have to start making the fiscal argument instead. And so I-

It's a shit fucking argument. It's really horrible. horrible oh you're not thinking about your workforce in 20 years time exactly it's a horrible argument to have to make because it has nothing to do with compassion and decency and humanity and again it goes to you know when we were talking about extrinsic extrinsic and extrinsic valuing we have a society that's very much valuing based on what can you earn but what is your contribution to society it's human capital right it's yeah you are a unit of production and actually it's only worth investing in you if i get a return on my investment

not that you're a human being and therefore you are entitled to basic rights in terms of proper sanitation access to nutritious food it's actually the only thing that's going to make a compelling argument for some corners of of our political system is the fiscal argument which is if you treat this person like a pension fund invest in them early enough and you'll get a better return on your investment which is a deeply colonial argument too i mean because if you look at the i mean with a lot of colonialism it's maybe don't be so mean to the people of this country that you've taken over because we kind of need them to make a bunch of shit too. Like the example I often use is King Leopold of Belgium and his history in the Congo and the rubber plantation in the Congo, which was horrendous. Like the human rights abuses

that went on there were horrendous, but it was the British that pointed out how bad uh leopold was doing there it was the british who pointed out what he's doing there is really really wrong but it wasn't from a position of of compassion it was a position of it's this isn't a very effective way to get rubber if you chop everybody's hands off you have to show a little bit of compassion, but not for to to use roger's position um you know their worthiness in terms of what they're able to produce years later and so if we kind of bring it full circle back it's incredibly difficult i think for people to engender a sense of their own intrinsic worth in an environment in a political system which says actually you are only as valuable as how much you can produce and how much therefore we pay you and it means that people who are in these kind of um very flimimsy kind of gig economy,

zero hours contracts jobs, end up with huge experiences of a loss of self-worth, with depression, with a sense of anxiety, that when you're living on contracts like this, you don't have certainty, so incredible stress. You can't plan, which gets in the way of your ability to socialize. when you're living on contracts like this you don't have certainty so incredible stress you can't plan you know which gets in the way of your ability to socialize you know you can't say yeah i'm gonna meet you guys out you know on saturday night because you might suddenly have to work at

that point the the very economic structure undermines people's ability to be mentally well and that they don't want to hear that absolutely not i mean how do you navigate how do you navigate this do you ever find yourself having to make arguments and you're like i i hate having to make this argument but i need to make it in order to convince people that that's proper nutrition is related to well-being yeah it's that's the kind of um deal that i've i've kind of made in the book what i've what i've said is um basically here are the reasons that we should care that children have enough to eat um you knowally, it's the nice thing to do. And as well-fed, wealthy adults, it's kind of morally abhorrent that we might sit around and vote on the

possibility of a child not having something to eat during the summer holidays. But if you're not convinced by the compassion argument, is the fiscal argument um and and so i set out both because you know okay so you're basically going i like okay if this is the only way you're gonna fucking listen but this yeah you know what i mean yeah okay no 100 percent um because you have to i can spend a lot of time speaking to the choir, you know, and lots of people already agree that this philosophical position, this political ideology is not just cruel, but inaccurate. And it's creating the exact opposite outcome than it's intended and that you want to achieve um i'm going to ask you one last question and what i'd like to know about is is in your work um the relationship between we say stress in the body and hormones like cortisol and then

what does that do to a person's diet or what they crave well a lot of things so um when we think about say cortisol we think of it as a stress hormone but it's one of its most important jobs is energy homeostasis so one of the things that cortisol does along with adrenaline is to release sugars and fats into your bloodstream and it does that because when you are under threat or when you have to face a challenge, your brain consumes more energy. So what cortisol does is to say, listen, if we need to run away, fight our way out of this or stand our ground, we're going to need energy. So your response to stress increases your blood levels of sugar and fats in the in the short term which is fine because if you then do fight or something then

you'll use up that energy and then you'll return to baseline um we know also that uh carbohydrates can blunt the stress response so if I give somebody some carbohydrates and then expose them to a stressor, they will have less of a peak release of stress hormones than someone who hasn't had that exposure to carbohydrates. It also means then that for many people, consumption of carbohydrates helps their body to helps their body to modulate to regulate their stress response but what that means in the long term is that people who are exposed to chronic stressors stressors like poverty like social defeat like prejudice like racism like having to work three or four jobs just to pay the rent.

Those people are living with chronic high blood glucose, chronic high blood fats. They're living with chronic elevation in their immune response, something we call inflammation. And all of these things are corrosive to physical and mental health. So these are the kind of physical correlates to what we see in terms of people in areas of deprivation dying 10 years sooner than the wealthiest 10 percent of the population do you see a correlation between cheap food so food that's actually cheap and then the food that is cheap being, you know, high carbohydrates. The food that is cheap is something that would appeal to someone who has a lot of cortisol in their body, whose stress is high. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because the brain, the brain body is trying to regulate the stress response and what it will have learned unconsciously but the body will have recognized that there is this correlation between consumption of carbohydrates

and a reduction in that experience going back to valence a reduction in that sense of unpleasantness there's also you know to an extent that the consumption of carbohydrates can increase the availability of serotonin in the brain so there are very real ways in which the experience of stress increases the palatability and the attractiveness of high carbohydrate salty sweet foods and so as well you know, being often much cheaper than their whole food equivalent or their more nutritious equivalent. both priced out of a nutritious diet, but then also living, experience lifestyle factors that make a poor quality diet more attractive to them. So it's a vicious cycle.

It's incredibly harmful and hard to escape. Today, so there was a pigeon outside my window last night, right? So I didn't sleep. And as well, because it was a climate collapse pigeon. The pigeon was making noise all night because it just kind of, the temperature was too hot. I didn't know what time of night it was. So I was worried about that.

So I didn't sleep. So today I have that level of stress that you get when you're working and you're not sleeping. And I decided I'm getting a fucking takeaway. Not only like, okay okay i don't have the energy to cook but also i'm really craving one and i'm telling myself you didn't sleep last night you deserve a little reward but is there a part of my brain that is seeking a very high like i want high salt high fat loads of carbs that's what i want when i eat today it's not just a decision

my body is like we want this is what you need now no for sure we know that kind of that's an uncontroversial position we know that if you don't sleep people who have poor sleep have shifts in their their um their brain chemistry in the attractiveness of these hyperpalatable foods. So you're more likely to crave them. You're more likely to get a kind of reward response when you eat them. But also, you're going to feel hungrier in the day. Your hunger hormones increase and your satiety hormones go down when you are underslept. There is a very clear relationship between poor sleep, this craving of these certain foods, and over the long term, your risk then of type 2 diabetes.

And then similarly, when I have a great day, lots of sleep, exercise exercise I met all my goals that day I'm feeling very good about myself then the the thought of an unhealthy takeaway is like yuck I don't want that and I want I can't wait to go home and begin the journey of a wonderful home-cooked meal with lots of nutrients and fresh vegetables is there also a correlation there so i would there's less data on that and i would suggest that actually what you're experiencing is really a kind of sense of agency right your day well you feel really good and actually you have more energy because we know that that sense of motivation isn't just from the available physical energy it's from the available mental energy and your mental energy

is closely correlated to your dopamine release so if you've had a really good day you get this dopamine release you're feeling good and now you're ready for another reward and so you might be thinking and the other thing that dopamine does of course is about um motivation and working towards a goal and so if you're feeling already better then you're more motivated to work towards a goal and if that means making a lovely home-cooked meal from scratch then you're anticipating the reward of that sense of satisfaction and as well it's curiosity and creativity if i think about a meal that i'm making later on tonight it feels like writing a song it

feels like painting a painting i can't wait to begin the process of doing it i'm really excited about it and i'm curious about it yeah yeah yeah wow i always think of food as as an accessible creative outlet for those of us who don't feel like we can paint or play an instrument you know that you can take a few ingredients and and create something i think and there's lovely what i love about preparing food is the narrative journey in it just picking out your vegetables and picking out the things in the supermarket and then going through the process of finally eating it you know it's it's set up conflict and resolution there's a full story there and what's really interesting about that is um i think because i often people who don't like to cook say yeah but then it's over so quickly and i think that becomes quite a nice metaphor

for our relationship with the process versus the outcome big time i there's something about food just arriving at my door and then i eat it that's really unrewarding you know um i'm gonna leave it at that kimberly is that okay okay yeah no thank you so much for coming on the podcast that was wonderful chat my absolute pleasure thank you kimberly wilson for that enlightening and enjoyable conversation there about the process of psychotherapy that was great crack I'll be back next week with a hot take

I'd imagine in the meantime rub a dog wave at a swan get a worm and move the swarm the worm out of the sunlight so it doesn't dry up

put the worm into a wet place alright dog bliss I'll catch you next week the warm out of the sunlight so it doesn't dry up. Put the warm into a wet place. All right, dog bliss. I'll catch you next week. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishikesh Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder.

April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. Thank you. you