The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking about Anxiety with a Psychology Professor

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Professor Ian Robertson is a Neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology in Trinity College. We speak about Anxiety, neurodiversity and the medicalisation of human behaviour Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First one to the top of the road shall inherit the kingdom of the piss fox. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. The sound is quite different this week. And I'll tell you why. I'm not in my studio at all. I'm away from my studio this week because I'm off doing a little bit of work. But where I am, the sound is disgraceful like listen to this postman postman listen to that terrible echo so i brought my good mic with me but a good mic isn't worth

fuck all if the room you're in contains multiple echoes so i'm gonna try and speak as lowly as I can so that we don't have a very a very loud podcast now the problem that's happening is that my microphone has got one of those real furry things on it you know to keep the wind away from it but I have to go up so close to the microphone to get a decent sound that the furriness of the mic is now invading the the inside of my nostrils. So that's quite unpleasant. So hopefully I won't sneeze in the middle of this podcast. Just a little live gig update.

So if you were listening last week or the week before, you'd know that I had some gigs planned in Cork on the 27th and 28th of December. They're sold out however I've now had to move them until March unfortunately so if you bought tickets for that gig they're going to be valid in March and you'll get a little email

I imagine the reason this is happening is the government brought in very sudden restrictions to live gigs as a result of the pandemic I don't have a problem with restrictions being brought in to gigs because of public health reasons I understand that the issue I have is that the nature which they did it so December is a very big month for live gigs. A lot of people plan their tours around December.

Like when it comes to a live gig, it's not just the artist that's employed. You've got venue staff, right, door staff, security, lighting people, sound people. Several people get employed when a gig goes on on not to mention the artist and the promoter you've got photographers who come along to the gigs you've got journalists who come along to review gigs it's an entertainment industry so now a lot of people are without employment for the month of December an incredibly busy month and January and February are quiet so a huge swathe of people now don't have income for December and the government regulations are gigs can go ahead but only at 50% capacity now what's the problem with that what the government should be doing is if the

government come in and say you can do a gig but only if 50% of people are allowed in, then the government effectively should be purchasing half the tickets, subsidizing the gig, so that everyone gets paid. But what happens when the government says, you can do a lot of gigs in December if you like, but they must be at 50% capacity.

No one's going to do that gig because if you run a gig at 50 capacity then it doesn't earn enough money to make the gig make sense people aren't getting paid if you run a gig at 50 capacity because you still have to pay for the overheads like venue hire electricity all this stuff so by the government saying you can do gigs but at 50 capacity what it does is it forces all artists to cancel their gigs so that's what everyone's doing everyone is cancelling their gigs in december and postponing them if they're lucky if they're able to even postpone them and it's just a really shitty sneaky thing the government has done because if they outright cancelled gigs then they might have a responsibility to subsidize but they're not doing that they're saying oh you can do gigs but you have to do them at 50%

and no venue is going to do that no promoter is going to do that no artist is going to do that because a 50% capacity gig is not economically viable people don't get paid if you do that gig plus it's a logistical nightmare let's just say I was like fuck that I'm going to do my two cork gigs at the end of December and I'm gonna do them at 50% capacity like what do you do how do I pick half the audience and say you can't come and if I do say you can't

come like are Ticketmaster gonna give back the fee for those people who bought those tickets highly unlikely so the government have done a sneaky thing they presented the entire live industry with a catch-22 and like i said i'm not complaining if this is a public health thing if it's a safety thing if it's reducing the spread of covid fair

enough but subsidize people for the love of fuck this is people's lives this is people's livelihoods and it's just one of multiple occasions where it's quite clear that the the Irish government just doesn't take the entertainment industry seriously at its core the Irish government doesn't view live gigs or nightclubs or any type of entertainment as legitimate employment or as a real job it's like cancelling a fun party and it's like no yes it might look like fun but there's a lot of professionals involved in this and now they don't have work. So this December. Support Irish artists in any way you can. If you have a fucking band. That you were going to go and see.

And now you can't. Because it's postponed. Have a think about buying their merch. Or something like that. You know. Because a lot of people are out of work. I'm disturbed. By the sound of this.

This microphone lads in this room. It's really. Really bothering me um luckily this week i have a pre-recorded interview and a fantastic guest that you're going to enjoy listening to the guest that i have this week is professor ian robertson and ian And Ian Robertson is a clinical psychologist, a neuroscientist. They're a professor of psychology in Trinity College in Dublin. So Ian is also just a really nice person. Someone who's down to earth and is good crack.

Most importantly, he's an expert in his field field not only is he an expert in his field he's world renowned he's the real deal and me and Ian had a chat about about neuroscience and about psychology mainly this spoke about anxiety and this conversation we had it nearly ended up as a therapy session for me because I spoke about my own experiences with anxiety but as I was doing it Ian kind of explains what's happening in the human brain when we experience anxiety so this is a really enjoyable chat that i had that i'm excited to share with you also we spoke a little bit about neurodivergence things like that ian himself is quite critical of the medicalization of human behavior but mainly if you experience anxiety if you're interested in what anxiety is here's a

conversation with a fucking expert about it something i'd like to flag before we go straight into the interview is so i'm very interested in cognitive behavioral therapy i've done numerous podcasts on cognitive behavioral therapy it's a therapy process that I use on myself and that I've gone through in counselling but the thing is with CBT it's made by and for a western society and by western society I mean a society that traces its ideological roots

to ideas that come from the Romans and the Greeks. Specifically ideas of rationalism and western empiricism and evidence based stuff. We take this for granted because we come from the west. We take it for granted but these are almost social constructs. granted but these are almost social constructs our way of thinking about society about ourselves about other people about time our entire way of relating with these things goes right back to greek and roman ideas and cbt is made with that in mind but some societies and some cultures specifically indigenous cultures like indigenous cultures in in South America or in Africa or in Australia, these cultures don't originate from Western concepts of rationalism and empiricism. going around the world that western psychology and specifically cbt sometimes doesn't work on people who don't come from a culture that's based in western empiricism in in ideas that

come from the greeks and the romans so one of the things i brought up in the chat with ian was i brought up in um there's indigenous cultures in Australia I believe their names are the Yarralin and the Yingara people and they have a very different view and perception of time than we would in the west

now already that might sound a bit a bit mad how can you have a different perception of time time is there. Time is observable. It's the linear passage of events. Well, that's actually the limitation of our Western thought. If you look at what a quantum physicist would have to say,

or an astrophysicist, modern science, modern physics, modern physics will say that time is not linear. Time can be circular. Time is is bendable time is movable so this idea of time being straight and fixed that's the limitation of the western mind and there's indigenous cultures that have a an idea of time that's actually much more in line with what current science says. And one example is this indigenous Australian culture that I bring up, because I was reading a paper, and in this paper they were speaking about the folklore of these peoples. And in this folklore, Ned Kelly is present.

Ned Kelly was an Australian bushranger from Ireland in the folklore of the Yarraillan and the Yingara people like we think of Ned Kelly as oh yeah he was a fella and he was alive and he's dead and that's how we think of Ned Kelly in the west but in the folklore of these people Nedlly is like alive and dead at the same time and he's everywhere all at once and it's hard for us to get our heads around it so so i brought it up because i was asking ian how would something like cbt which is so rooted in western empiricism how could that possibly be of benefit or help people whose idea of something like time is so fundamentally different to our idea of it?

And I don't think I gave the concept and idea of this the respect that it deserved up on stage. I don't think I had all the facts at hand. So I'm flagging it beforehand. I'm going to go back to Australia, hopefully sometime in 2022 to do a tour and when I do

I want to speak to an indigenous Australian person about the folklore and ideas and the underpinnings of that culture because to me

it's utterly fascinating and I've even tried to read about it like there's a concept within indigenous Australian belief systems called the dream time and it sounds fascinating but I don't even think I have the language to understand it it's so different to western empiricism I don't think I can even truly understand it. But I have listeners to this podcast who are Indigenous Australian people. So apologies if I didn't give the concepts and ideas the respect they deserved.

I'm very aware of the impact of colonialism on Indigenous Australian people and the erasure of your culture and the genocide that happened in Australia to indigenous people. And if you have any thoughts about when I get to Sydney or Melbourne or Perth, who I should talk to, who would be good to chat to, about indigenous Australian mythology, please give me a shout on Instagram DM or whatever the fuck so before we get into the chat with Ian Robertson the neuroscientist the psychologist the professor of psychology let's have a little ocarina pause I don't have an ocarina because I'm not even in

my studio I'm not even in my studio what have I got I've got a weightlifting? I've got a weightlifting glove. I've got a single weightlifting glove that happened to be in my bag. All right? I don't even have anything percussive. So let's play with the weightlifting glove. And while this is happening, you might hear an advert. Oh, there's Velcro.

Okay. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game.

And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone.

Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. Oh, yeah. That's sunrisechallenge.ca lots of traffic there on the M50 guys if you've got a phone call 78321 ring in tell us your opinions about the Velcro glove so there you go you'd have heard a fucking advert there for some shit

I can't get over the sound of this fucking room em support the pack and now the fucking microphone fluffy thing is in my nose support this podcast on patreon will you and patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast this podcast is my full-time job this podcast is how i earn a living i adore doing it i love it but if you

enjoy this podcast and you're taking something from it please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month all right if you can't afford that if you're out of work don't worry about it all right if you can't afford it you're paying for the person who can't afford it so everybody gets a podcast I get to earn a living what a beautiful model that's based on soundness and kindness. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast. Support independent podcasts. Support whatever small independent podcast you're listening to. Because podcasts are turning into radio.

Podcasts are turning into radio. See, you wouldn't get 2FM with a fucking echo in the room like that. Support independent podcasts any way you can. Like them, share them, you know the crack. I'm on Twitch. Not this Thursday, because I'll be away Friday night. I'm back in my studio. I'll be on Twitch.

Twitch.tv forward slash TheBlindByPodcast. Support this podcast on Patreon. Thank you to all my patrons. Beautiful people. Okay, here's the chat I had with Professor Ian Robertson, an expert in neuroscience, an expert in psychology. It's less of a chat, and it turned into more of me receiving a therapy session in front of a thousand people.

But there you go. Dog bless. Also, before I forget, Ian has written many books that are worth checking out. Go to ianrobertson.org and if you want to follow him on Twitter, it's at IHRobertson. And then an amazing thing happened in the 1980s. They found out how to make MRI scanners able to look at brain function, to look at the brain working as you remembered things or thought about things. That's brain imaging, functional brain imaging. And suddenly psychology became

respectable to neuroscientists and suddenly you got this joining of the study of the brain. But what was, what was neuroscience before MRI scans? Was that like literally chopping up people's brains? It was almost, it was almost entirely,, the medical doctors who studied neurology and neuropathology chopped up people's brains. Then they discovered CT scanners that could give you pictures of the structure of the brain. And then the MRI scanners that could look at the structure in much more detail.

And then... So neurologists would study people with diseases of the brain, etc. scanners that could look at the structure in much more detail and then so so and then so neurologists would study people with diseases of the brain etc and you can look at people's brains while they're thinking about a certain thing and actually see in real time yeah yeah absolutely i mean and and now you can even put tiny magnetic pulses into the brain while they're doing thinking and emotional tasks or remembering tasks. And you can then see how the different parts of the brains are interacting when you activate one part.

So it's becoming incredibly sophisticated. But that being said, I'm a psychologist. You know, to get respectability among the neuroscientists who largely worked with small animals and cells in the laboratories, to get their respect, you know, we call ourselves cognitive neuroscientists

now, but we're really psychologists. And psychology is almost philosophy. Well, you see, philosophers are, most philosophers are much smarter than I am. It's a hugely challenging, intellectually demanding enterprise. Psychology is a science, and science is a method, and it's a method for correcting the inevitable tendency. We all have to want to confirm our own

opinions and observations. So it's a way of systematically gathering data to say am I right or am I wrong? And psychology has made advances where it has been a science. And there have been great psychologists like Freud and Jung

who have come up with amazing observations and ideas but they weren't scientists. Some of their ideas were absolutely on the ball and some of them were wrong, but they weren't committed to science in the way that you are, blind boy. Oh, thank you. The reason I was so delighted with our conversation a couple of weeks ago was because you respect science and you understand science and you want to know about science

and so the way we make progress is by correcting this tendency we all have to verify our own opinions and that's so science is not just another perspective on the world another kind of alternative view science is a method for

correcting our inevitable tendencies to and all the kind of tricks of the mind the heuristics we have that make us make false conclusions and we can trick ourselves so easily so science is basically a set toolbox to help us not not not trick ourselves all the time like so i I tend to associate science with rationality, okay? Yeah. And something like cognitive psychology, that's really rationality-based. Yeah.

In fact, like, to use... I speak about CBT a lot. You're familiar with CBT, yeah? So to use CBT means you live your life like a scientist. If you suffer anxiety, depression, you take the faulty beliefs that you have about yourself or about other people or about the world and then you test them against reality

to see the result. But how does, human beings are irrational. Like irrationality is a part of the human condition. I was telling you earlier about it. I spent a good year literally being afraid of my shadow. Yeah. Like, how does...

How do you make that science? Like, even something like Carl Jung. Some of his stuff was mad. Like, his theory of the collective unconscious. Yeah. Like, how does that bear with modern science or modern psychology

is Jung a dirty word look Jung was a incredibly clever guy he wandered off into becoming over confident about his own ideas

and engaging. So he became as much an artist as he was, and not really a scientist. So the thing about these kind of turn-of-the-century psychoanalysts was they built cults. It's very, very easy in this area to build a cult. It is, though. No, but I mean, seriously, we have this definition of a cult. We have in our minds what a cult looks like. But then if you take that away and you look at what happens on Facebook groups or even on Twitter,

it's the same mechanics of what a cult is. It just doesn't look like what we think a cult is, you know? So it makes no sense for a scientist to say, are you a Jungian or a Freudian? That is cult language. It's about the ideas and the observations. Do they stand up to the methods of science as to whether they're true or not? And the methods of science do work for the mind.

And some of them end up being true and some of them being false. Now, we had a very interesting talk about you, about how would cognitive behaviour therapy work in a culture where, you know, indigenous culture, culture for instance where verbal analytic thinking isn't oh yeah so what we were chatting about was um so like if you think of CBT right that's very much based

on rationalism is a western idea it's western empiricism which comes from the Greeks and the Romans right and that CBT works really well in in our western society but if you think of a culture like um indigenous Australian people there's indigenous Australian cultures and they don't even have a concept of time the way that

you and I do we think of time it's quite capitalistic it's we think of time as just the this thing that passes right but like there's a there's a culture in i don't know what part of australia it is it's near where ned kelly was you know who ned kelly was don't you the mad irish fella who dressed him up in tin and fought the guards so ned kelly is like a bushranger folk hero in australia but there's an indigenous tribe who not worship ned kelly but they have respect for him but they don't see ned kelly is dead they're like ned kelly is dead and he's also here now and he's also everything all at once and we we don't even have language to understand that like if you say that to us, it's just like, no, he's dead. And what you're talking about is his memory.

But they're like, no, we have a completely different worldview. We view time and everything completely differently. And then the question is, how does Western psychology then, how does it help people like that when they don't have a context for western rationality well the thing is that there's different ways of thinking and you know when you're writing one of your amazing short stories the last thing you can should be in there is in a state of rationality, it doesn't work. So you have to unlock circuits in your brain in order to engage in this amazing flight of fancy. But you also have to earn a living.

So you're a very well-organized guy who gets this amazing event this amazing event together so it's not an either or i have a closed way of operating my mind and an open way of operating my mind so when i'm creating when i'm when i'm writing a short story like that one about rory gallagher i literally have to find a space and i relate it back to childhood play it's like i'm playing with lego but I need to get to a state whereby the rules of society which say to me you can't write a story about climbing inside Rory Gallagher man that's just ridiculous but I have to go the fact that my brain is telling me that that's ridiculous I need to follow that and try and make it make sense and i call that well i don't call it that the psychologist donald mckinnon who studied creative flow calls it the open way of

thinking and when you're thinking in an open fashion criticality doesn't come in the rules of society don't come in i forget to eat i like if i do creative flow for a long enough time i'll forget my dinner and and if i was to operate that all the time, I would not function as a human being. So I have to compartmentalize and then I'm in the closed way of thinking. And that's how I do something like organize this gig. That's how I wash myself. That's how I live a life in accordance with the rules of society. But that doesn't allow creativity in.

That's what we were getting at. And I'm imagining that when you're in that state of flow, if you can get into it, the self, the ego, the vulnerable self and ego doesn't really... it's gone. I'm nothing. I'm a ball of energy floating in the universe. Whereas when you're anxious, the big self the self is shivering in a corner there. And the thing we know about the brain, the self is a construction, it's an illusion. What does that mean now, the self is a construction?

That we are a collection of habits and impulses and influences on us that we don't know about, historically and currently, the environment we're in, the people we're in, the upbringing we've had. We can't understand most of the things that are causing you to say the thing you are saying now or behaving. most of the things that are causing you to say the thing you are saying now are behaving. And the illusion that we have a pilot inside our head, a self, that's making these decisions, is, yes, there is, of course, that experience. Of course, I wouldn't be here tonight if I didn't have a self. But it's a very fragile artificial construction

and in fact there's some very interesting work going on now there's a resurgence of psychedelics yes where I don't even do them, I get a panic attack yeah

where you do get a panic attack. Yeah. Where you do get a... That kind of breaks down and you get... Actually, in some of these states, you get closer to the raw brain function, the raw... What does that mean? Well, the brain acts as a prediction machine. So what you see is essentially what you predict. So you meet someone you know in the street

and your brain doesn't process the full complexity of that person's face. You don't see like a child. Because you have learned through learning to see what you expect to see jesus and the way the brain works is is essentially is a tick box ah yeah that's what i expected it's filling in the dots it's filling in the dots exactly right and um that's what how we get through life if we didn't fill in the dots because if you went around like a my two-year-old grandson going yeah look at that you know if you went around like that all the time... You'd get nothing done.

You'd get nothing done. You'd be eaten by a tiger and you'd be dead. So you have to start predicting the world. But that can become a trap. And the way that some of these psychedelics seem to act is by disrupting that prediction mechanism, which can have bad consequences, as you've just said,

as well as interesting consequences. But it should only be used in a therapeutic context, and that's not available in this country. It's only available in research places. But it could be in 10 years' time. Well, I actually was in Australia, and I interviewed Dr. Paul Litnitsky who was given

a license to do it he's using it with patients who are dying he's using psychedelics as what he recalls as a dress rehearsal for death yeah

which is phenomenal when you think about people who are like two weeks they're like you've got two weeks to live and he takes them through a psychedelic experience,

which is, I don't know what the fuck it is, but that's what he does. Yeah. He's a real doctor. Like, he's got a grant off the Australian government. Like, it's not some lad I met.

Yeah. But you were saying about Ned Kelly and these guys that think that time, Ned Kelly still exists. But think that time, Ned Kelly still exists, but you know, and you're right, time is a construction. I mean, you were talking about Einstein earlier. Yeah. About time doesn't exist on its own, it's space time.

Our perception of time is wrong. And what science tells us about time. Yeah. Like, time bends with gravity. So if I was able to go to the sun, I'm not. But if I was able to go to the sun for an hour, if I came back to Earth, like, a couple of weeks or years could have passed. Exactly, yeah. And that's real.

That's time fucking bends. Yeah, so that means... And also, we are all... Everything we are doing just now is the exchange of information. It's information. In fact, the whole economy is now based on information, on Facebook and Twitter and everything like that. And the human brain is an information processor.

And we all know the law of physics that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Well, there is a similar law in quantum physics that says information can be neither created nor destroyed, which makes me realise or believe that actually the indigenous people in Australia who believe that Ned Kelly is still there, they're right, in a sense, because the whole who believe that Ned Kelly is still there, they're right in a sense,

because the whole information that was Ned Kelly has still exists in the universe and still continues. Oh, that's beautiful. You know, so, so information. So,

so that's why there is a kind of digital immortality around, you know, as a comfort for us all, you know. Well, I often, so I wouldn't be, I'm not into the kind, kind i'm not into god i don't believe in him no i don't want to say that that's too arrogant i'd be agnostic i don't know what the crack is right but i'm not into that whole god

thing i'm not buying that one but one thing i do to process grief like i my dad died when I was 20 right and one thing I do I can't soothe myself by saying oh he's above in heaven now fucking having crack with his granddad I can't go there you know I'd love to that'd be lovely

to think I could but I can't but what I do instead is I it's a concept I took from a fella called Irving Yellam he's a a psychotherapist and the concept of rippling so like my dad's dead and you can apply this not just my dad

But anyone's dad who's dead or anyone's person who was close to you who was dead How their ideas their mannerisms like there's there's ways that I move my hands or cross my legs And that's how my dad used to do it. Or I have values and beliefs, and they're all from him, and he's not physically here. But how can he be gone when it's there and how I speak and how I relate to the world? So therefore, yeah, his physical body is gone,

but he's not dead. No, he's not. The information is still there in some form and still active and still useful but not the individual self because that is a bit of a temporary artificial construction to survive

on earth and you know I used to study people who had strokes to the right hemisphere of their brain which produced a phenomenon in some people called unilateral neglect, where they lost awareness of the whole left side. Not just the left side of their body, but the whole left side of space. What? It was as if the world on the left side didn't exist.

the left side didn't exist. And that could produce remarkable phenomena of people who... There was a member of CHAP who was completely paralysed and he couldn't move his left arm at all, but believed he had a third arm that could move. And he had completely believed firmly that... This is called paraphernia, where he believed he had a third arm. And I'd say, well, show me moving it and he would move it. This guy wasn't psychotic. But you can't see it, but to him he's moving it. To him it was completely real. And how cognizant was this person? How able were you to engage with him in a conversation?

Yeah, really, really well. Really well. So it's not against, he was able to talk about his family, able to talk about having a stroke, but there there was this he denied he was paraplegic because he had this third arm that could that could move did that worldview help him to live his life with meaning or was no it's it's that denial of your disability is called anosognosia is actually associated with you doing rather poorly a huge so I asked the internet for some questions when I said that you were going to come on and a massive thing that people wanted me to speak about with you was what is neurodivergence? People who are neurodivergent, what is that? What does it mean?

That's a great question. So I'm temperamentally quite an anxious person. You know, I was an anxious child. I cried, didn't want to go to school. So, in a sense, I'm neurally divergent because I have a slight propensity for anxiety. Now, that over, I've learned, you know, as you have, to control this. And I'm not an anxious person, you know, largely. Are you still neurodivergent? Do you just have tools to work with it? You see, here's the challenge here.

It's about... It used to be that you would describe people in continuums of personality so you would get some people so we've got extrovert introvert now these are not these are not two categories that's a continuum people vary on this anxiety and stability these are the two big two of the really big personality dimensions but they're not they're not categories they're not medical categories they're continuum and that's also true for things like um if you like the kinds of behaviors associated say with asperger's or your propensity to have mood swings

all of these are dimensions not categories so when someone says something like ADHD, which is considered neurodivergent, you're not crazy about that label? Well, you see, here's the challenge. It's a spectrum, and there is a big, big downside. We have to respect and admire the wonderful variants of human behavior and categories. But you have to be aware of putting on a coat that says, I have this medical, essentially medical diagnosis, because that's what it is.

The problem then is that the great psychologist, Carol Dweck in Stanford, you'll know about her, she says the theory you have about yourself is so important, whether you have a fixed or a changed mindset. Now, industry has taken this on big time and commercialized it. It's a fundamental idea of how you think of yourself.

So if you internalize a medical diagnosis, what that is saying is essentially I'm no longer in control of certain aspects of my behavior. And therefore you won't engage in the ups and downs and difficult learning that you need to do to change these behaviors. Because the human brain is enormously plastic. Hugely plastic.

We only have 20,000 genes. They cannot possibly code for all the behaviors we engage in and the emotions we have. We were designed to be shaped by our environments and our experiences. have. We were designed to be shaped by our environments and our experiences. And what classifying oneself as being neurodiverse in a certain way, the risk you run is you sabotage your belief and confidence in being able to change the way you are. Whereas, you know, if someone has been very anxious, for instance,

if they were to adopt that mantle and say, oh, I'm essentially genetically anxious, why are you then going to engage on the tough business of relearning that you require in order to become less anxious? And we can all learn to be less anxious. So essentially, you're almost critiquing psychiatry there to an extent. Yes, I am.

Yes, I am. A medicalization of human behavior has huge risks to it. So one thing that we'll say psychiatrists will use to diagnose is that the Diagnostics and Statistic Manual and this is like a checklist yeah and one thing I always with myself on my own journey that I always remember when I was like 1920 and I first presented with anxiety no, I didn't know what it was. I'd been living with it for about a year. It had gotten so bad that I had agoraphobia.

I was living with anxiety so continually and consistently that, you know, it affected my stomach. I started to veer into what you could call psychotic territory. I was living my life in a way that was deeply irrational. I joked earlier about being afraid of my shadow. I was fucking afraid of my shadow. I would see my shadow on a wall, and I couldn't tell the difference between me and my shadow.

So I used to go like this. And I'd walk around like that because if I saw my fucking shadow, it would scare the living fuck out of me because I'm like, how do I know I'm me and that's not me? And that's where I'd gotten to. The anxiety was so bad that that's where I'd gotten to

because I was stressed out so much that I'm not, now I can go, what the fuck, it's your fucking shadow for fuck's sake. Just hold up a lamp for God's sake. I can do that now because I'm able to use the criticality of my brain i in a relaxed way i'm able to see that that's utterly absurd

but i was so in like six months of anxiety a year not a fucking hope i was going there and when i first presented to a psychiatrist luckily i happened to meet a psychiatrist who was very open-minded who was forward thinking they could have dsm me as psychotic at that point and put me on an anti-psychotic they read they could have done it quite easily instead this psychiatrist said to me no you've got anxiety let me explain to you this is uh it's like a fire alarm going off and there's no fire and he said to me I'm going to recommend to you a book. And the book was called The Calm Technique. It was just basic meditation. And I went and I meditated. I learned how to breathe properly. So I'm breathing from my

stomach. And then after about a week then of proper breathing, I'm like, yeah, I think it's just my shadow. Do you know what I mean mean but I'd gone down by about 50% I'd gone down to now all of a sudden I still have an anxiety but for it to seem manageable and he gave me the option of medication and he gave me the option to come back but I went back then and things had changed because this person I could have gone both ways I could have walked out with a diagnosis with with a label, with medication to go along with it and I don't think I'd be where I am today if that happened.

You wouldn't and I'm so glad you met a really good psychiatrist who was practicing excellent psychology and not trying to They were a Buddhist. They happened to be a Buddhist while being a psychiatrist and that's what helped. Had you I worked many years ago, I worked in New Zealand well being a psychiatrist and that's what helped but you know had you

many years ago I worked in New Zealand in a psychiatric clinic and I saw horrible cases of young people coming into that totally medical model psychiatric clinic with an episode of psychosis and I saw them

ending up in heavily more and more heavily medicated ending up being heavily more and more heavily medicated ending up in one with a padded cell in this place would you believe it was just ghastly and I remember going in an ambulance with this poor young lad where he was going to be for the rest of his life and yet that yes the guy did have a psychotic breakdown it could have developed into really bad schizophrenia, but it didn't have to. It was because the psychiatrist in that place had a completely medical model that everything was a symptom of a disorder, a chemical disorder

of the brain. And so the idea that you would take a symptom like being frightened of your shadow and treat that as a symptom rather than as a product of extreme anxiety that could be changed and dealt with and rethought of and relearned the whole notion of relearning was was was alien in that culture and And terrible things happened. And that could have happened to you with the wrong psychiatrist. Would you mind explaining to us what was going on? Not just my brain. What's going on with someone who has such extreme anxiety

that they begin to entertain deeply irrational ideas like that? What's going on in that person's brain? What was happening there? Well, let me give you an example of someone else. This person thought he was hearing voices. And if you think about it, we always have thoughts in our heads. And there are always sounds. Similarly, you can have sensations in your body, you know, that can end up feeling oh god what's wrong, is there a pain there, is there something wrong with me so any sensory experience can be created

and imagined by the brain like I've got tinnitus non-stop a sound that doesn't exist but it's present at all times exactly, and only when you pay attention to it are you really aware of it and attention is critical so what happens when you're in a state of anxiety

is your whole attention and memory systems become biased to look for evidence of threat because you're in what's called a threat mindset. You're anticipating punishment and you're looking for threats.

So for example, if I was in a state of anxiety here tonight, I'd be scanning for the person who's looking bored or angry. Don't worry, that's why the audience are dark. Ten years of gigging, lads, that's why you're in the dark. Seriously.

That's why I have them in the dark. I do a gig, I'd see one person who wasn't enjoying themselves and I could ruin the rest of the gig. Exactly. So that's because when you're anxious your attention will preferentially process threat signals like that. And why then do I discredit everyone who's enjoying it? Like, similarly, if I do this gig tonight and a bunch of people go online and say, that was a great gig, and then one person says that was a shit gig, that's the one I focus on and I ignore all the positive.

Yeah, and that happens when you're anxious. You're more likely to pay attention to that. And the rational thought is, I don't know how many people are in here. A thousand. Okay, say there's a thousand people in here. You know that statistically it's impossible that a thousand people will all be entertained and happy. Yeah. And so the rational thought is there.

Of course, there's going to be 10% of people who don't like what I'm saying. But when you're anxious, there's no room for that thought because your cognitive processing is disrupted by the anxiety. And also your attention is selectively focusing on further evidence. Also, your memory system is biased. It's much harder to remember the gigs that went really well and much easier to remember the gigs that went really badly. And that's a vicious cycle because your attention is focusing on threat

and your memory is remembering past failures, that makes you more anxious. It becomes more anxious anxious it becomes harder to think the antidote rational thoughts like of course of course some gigs don't go well yeah some you lose some you win some yeah most of them go okay but it could also be like you get on the bus in the morning and the bus driver doesn't say hello to you the way you want to say hello and then you assume that the bus driver hates you yeah but like who can relate or a co-worker like you all know that that's like what but what i want to know as well is like what the why why what the fuck is that about that doesn't but like

we we all do that why did evolution decide ah yeah let's go for a bit of that. Or God. Well, yeah. So it's very important for us to be able to read other people. In fact, it's probably the critical survival skill. It's probably why we have big brains. It's because we lived, we were a group species. And we needed big brains to try and work out what everyone else was thinking. Because what other people are thinking will determine whether they're going to help you or kill you. So reading other people's facial expressions is incredibly important,

and anticipating whether someone may be a threat is really a good survival thing. Something that might have been 30,000 years ago in a primitive society, where it literally may have meant life or death. It was quite useful for us. But now we're here in a functioning society. And if someone doesn't like you, they're not going to kill you. And if you're prone to anxiety, it's very, very easy to let that primitive impulse dominate. And that's why the critical thing is learning to control your attention. Because where your attention is determines what your thoughts are,

and therefore what your emotions are and what your behaviors are. And that's why things like mindfulness are so incredibly important. And so that's why it's fantastic your psychiatrist gave you that book to read. And that suddenly... The breathing was the thing. Before he even tried mindfulness. And this is something that's very useful for any anxiety i didn't notice that throughout all of the anxiety my breaths were yeah and it was all up here yeah and then the book just said very simple from now

on you don't breathe like that you put your your hand on your stomach, you breathe in through your nose, and you go... until you feel your stomach get big. And I'd never done it before. And I did it for a day, and everything became clear. And do you know what, Lime Boy? Go on. When you did that,

you changed the chemistry of your brain more precisely and more fundamentally and more helpfully than any pharmaceutical you could take could. What happened there? So when you breathe the way you just described, you change the carbon dioxide levels in your blood. you change the carbon dioxide levels in your blood. There's a wee part of the middle of your, deep in your brain called the locus coeruleus. It's the only source of noradrenaline. And noradrenaline is part of the fight or flight system.

Okay. And the locus coeruleus is sensitive to the carbon dioxide levels in your blood. It goes up and down with your breathing. So if you're feeling anxious, you do, as you say, tend to breathe shallowly from the top of your chest. Sometimes you may even hold your breath unconsciously. That changes the carbon dioxide levels,

increases the noradrenaline levels in your brain, and it worsens the effects of anxiety it essentially creates anxiety because noradrenaline has an inverted U-shaped curve too little like at 4 in the morning you don't think clearly and too much is the same when you're

very stressed so there's a sweet spot of noradrenaline that you're breathing is a brilliant tool to use to control and if you can bring down your noradrenaline, that your breathing is a brilliant tool to use to control. And if you can bring down your noradrenaline levels, you reduce your anxiety, and that makes it easier to think, allow that thought in to say, well, of course, there's one person in this audience who's not amused. It allows the rational thought to come in that's going to reduce your anxiety even further.

So I'm now able to use more of my brain, more of the computing power of my brain. Absolutely. And here's the awful thing. If you have internalized a medical characterization of yourself as I'm what I call the curse of genetic fatalism, you know, oh, I'm anxiety neurodiverse. Why would you bother learning,

relearning breathing techniques? Because that's nothing to do with what's causing the way I am feeling. It's, ironically is what a lot of it for me was the fact that I was born with asthma. And asthma is something, like I can't do anything about, like it's gone now because I got older the fact that I was I was born with asthma and asthma is something like I can't do anything about like it's gone now because I got older but when I was a kid I had fucking asthma it was an actual issue it's not something I could think my way around and that's

medicalization of that process my so my dad was prone to anxiety and the doctor said to my dad was prone to anxiety. And the doctor said to my dad, your son's got asthma, right? So if he runs really fast, there's a little risk of him dying. And then my dad went, what, he's going to die if he runs? And then the doctor went, no, no, no, come back, come back.

No, I didn't say that. I'm just saying he's got asthma. So if he really goes mad, I'm just telling you because I have to, he's got asthma. He might get an asthma mad like there's a i'm just telling you because i have to he's got asthma he might get an asthma attack some people who get asthma attack die but my dad heard that as i am going to die yeah but then when i was four or five years of age what happens when all the other kids are outside playing playing soccer i get told, no, you're going to die. But then I learned, if you be normal, if you behave the way that your peers are behaving, it means fucking death.

So then I get to 18, 19 years of age, where I'm now a fucking adult, and I'm in college, and I got a desperate panic attack once watching a friend making a stew. Seriously. Like flat out, nearly got knocked out unconscious. And then I took this to my counsellor. And the counsellor was like, we need to speak about the fucking stew.

You're not leaving this room. What does the stew mean to you? But through decent therapy, do you know what the stew meant? It meant autonomy. decent therapy do you know what the stew meant it meant autonomy what frightened me was i was four years of age not allowed playing soccer my friend was doing something that a 19 year old does they were feeding themselves they were preparing their own meals that terrified the fuck out of me made you think of death yeah but but a decent anxiety attack is the experience of I am dying right now.

999, I'm dying. A panic attack is I am dying. And I got many of those I am dying panic attacks and I had to through counselling, I had received the message from a young age that to be normal means to die because my dad, he had anxiety

and then he got his anxiety because his dad had to fight the black and tans but seriously this is how it goes his dad fucking shot 17 black and tans and had trauma for his life and then he his my granddad's mother was in the famine so like i don't see that as as genetic but i do see see that as intergenerational trauma that got passed to me. I learned as a little child, I'm going to look at the adults around me and see what they're doing. And if my dad is terrified of everything and telling me that I'm going to die, I don't have the criticality at four years of age to say, stop talking out of your arse. So I believed it and I internalized it.

But then through counseling, I repatterned my brain I was able to challenge no and what I said what did I start doing I started buying carrots I started buying meat I started make I started making a stew as ridiculous as it sounds the act of doing the thing I was so terrified of and testing my environment, all of a sudden then, it goes from that to being, I reckon I can make songs and go on stage. Do you get what I'm saying? From making a stew to actually achieving goals.

You know, you should write a textbook. I get loads of offers, but I refuse to do it because I'm not qualified. Well, look, what you say is absolutely right. Everything's about anxiety. Almost everything is about anxiety. And to the extent that you can... ..treat that as a learnable state,

treat that as a learnable state then it is possible to make almost any changes to your emotional state but here's the problem if you handicap yourself with a fixed

theory of the source of that like oh my mother my mother was very very anxious her mother was very, very anxious. Her mother was very, very anxious. Had I internalized a medical concept that I'm just a genetically anxious person, why would I engage? And it wasn't easy for you to learn to reprogram your brain.

No, it took years. It took years. I mean, the learning takes years as you're growing up. You're 18, 19 years learning that doing normal things means death. That's 19 years of patterns of brain activity being reinforced. You're not going to unlearn that in a day or a month. You're going to have to take time, and there's going to be trial and error. And there's going to be times when you do really badly, and you, you're going to have to take time and there's going to be trial and error. And there's going to be times when you do really badly and you feel you're going nowhere.

But if you have a fixed theory, a fixed medicalized notion of what the cause of this is, the first setback you have, you'll say, oh, this is not working. Why would I? This is how I am. Like with my fucking asthma which i can say is like i don't know what the asthma was caused but i doubt it was emotional that's a thing that was wrong with me but that's why as well you know i could have easily said sure my dad had anxiety and his dad had anxiety and my my his ma had anxiety and said, like you said, it's genetic. But instead I went post-colonial. If you're a farmer who's forced to fight British soldiers, you don't want to be a soldier, that's going to fuck you up.

If you existed in a famine, that's going to fuck you up. That's going to leave some deep shit. And they all had children and those children had to watch and learn how the adults are and of course it's going to make it to me and one of the things that drives me and that gives me deep fucking meaning in my life is

I'm breaking a cycle so I get to break the cycle you know what I mean? I mean that's such an important message that's just yeah yeah but not not like everybody if if you if if you've whatever the fuck is is going on with yourself and you can see parallels in in your parents or your grandparents what a beautiful opportunity to break

a cycle to end the pain to end the thing that caused them torture that's causing you torture and go fuck it it ends with me you know what a lovely thing to find meaning in it's a very important message yeah and it's it's selfless it's one of those things when it comes to meaning, you'll never get meaning in anything that has to do with receiving praise or even achievements or any aspect of your behavior. But something like that, it's internal, it's intrinsic, you know? If you could, and you're a brilliant communicator, tell everyone in this room and all the millions of people

who might listen to you that you have control over your own emotions. It's a hard business you can learn. That belief itself is going to cause so many lives to be so much better. But with that belief of overcoming poverty or hardship or trauma, we can all do it because our brains are so plastic. But we live in a century, we're now entering the century of the mind where we have to realize that we can become captains of our own ship,

of our own mental processes. And that's why methods like mindfulness and the books that you read that all of these things are such wonderful wonderful messages if you like for people to realize that yes you don't have to always feel anxious you don't you don't have to feel low in mood all the time that you are potentially if you only believe in yourself you can actually have the confidence to change that and what what i say to myself too as well is i've no so one of the things about anxiety was the the fear of of not not having control and i i accepted i've no control over what happens to me in life. None.

But I have full fucking control over how I react to what happens. Yeah, exactly. And that's the feeling of meaning and power and agency I get from that. No matter what the fuck happens. And also accepting that life is suffering. Tragedy happens. Bad things happen. And pain happens. But I have a choice over how i

react to that pain a metaphor i used once was um if i go out for a walk and i brush off a toxic plant let's just say a plant i'm allergic to so this plant that's the activating event causes me to have a little rash now that's unpleasant it's it's was outside of my control it was an accident it is suffering i've got a fucking rash however if i decide to fucking scratch it is to the point that it bleeds and it makes boils and now it's gone on for months that's a choice yeah do you know what i mean and it's the same thing with a bereavement with a loss the fucking pandemic we just had

I didn't have any control over that I coped with it that was a net that stung me the net is stinging me but I'm not going to be scratching that wound you know you said earlier about setting goals and taking action

and starting cooking your stew. Yeah. And the thing about anxiety is that what it does is it makes you want to do less stuff. It makes you withdraw because you want to avoid threat. So the person who's socially anxious, this text, oh, I don't feel well, I'm not coming out tonight, you know, or I won't go to that interview.

And across the world, and there's a study of 40 different countries, anxious people do less of everything because they're in a constant avoidance, threat avoidance mindset. And that's why what you said about just doing stuff, one of the antidotes to anxiety and the building of confidence And that's why what you said about just doing stuff, one of the antidotes to anxiety and the building of confidence that can lead to you being here tonight is just setting goals for yourself. Yes.

Just stretch you a bit, taking that action, that then gives you that little success experience, that little sense of achievement. You wrote a book about success about the impact is that what you're talking about there those little wins that's right because when i was doing that i experienced it as a as a boost in self-esteem yes so i i at one point i would not have been able to sit in this crowd and if i had to sit in this crowd it would have been as close to the exit door as possible and now I'm grand up here and my fear used to be fuck it what

if I'm in a big crowd and everyone starts staring at me I'm grand I'm okay with it now but I used to be the exact opposite and how it started it was actually the transformative power of art so I'd agoraphobia so i wasn't leaving my i'd created fucking boundaries i wasn't leaving so then because i'd accessed the counseling which was free in college at the time i would do little things like i'm going to the pub tonight and i know that it's going to be fucking terrifying it's going to be awful but i'm going to try bits of it and the one thing that broke through, and this is why art was so important to me, this was before fucking smartphones and shit, you know?

It was before Shazam. So I was in a pub, and the DJ played a song. The song was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott Heron, whose, his dad was actually the first ever black person to play for Glasgow Celtic. Little Scottish fact for you.

But I was in a pub and I was just, I was having anxiety. I'm in a crowd and this song came on and I would have been here and the DJ box would have been over there. And I just needed to know what this fucking song was it's like I couldn't take out my phone I couldn't ask anyone because no one knew it I was like if I don't go up to that fucking DJ box and ask that DJ what this song is this is going to be lost forever

and this is the most incredible song I've ever fucking heard the beauty of connecting with that song transcended my fear at that time and i fucking walked up to and i asked the dj and i remember writing it down on my hand because there was no phone to write it down on and protecting my hand for the rest of my life so i could go home onto limeware and legally download it and but only afterwards did i realize holy, you just walked through a crowd. You just walked through a crowd. And art, because art for me gets past all that ego shit, it goes to something deep inside me.

That's what helped me do it, you know? But that little act, I was fucking on cloud nine for a week. I was like, look, I can't believe I just walked through a crowd. You know what was happening in your brain as well? Go on. I mean, what was going on mentally was the most important thing. But just as that success, that feeling of

success of having walked through the crowd would make your reward network in the brain release extra dopamine in the reward network. It's the same network that gets switched on massively by things like cocaine or pints of Guinness. You know, the thing that makes you feel good. We've only got one of them, that reward network. And that little success experience of walking up to that DJ would have given you a little boost of dopamine activity,

which is a natural antidepressant Mm-hmm and a natural anti-anxiety drug and that's why what you were saying about just setting goals for yourself The things you do and just stretching yourself a bit giving yourself lots of these little success experiences That's that's an as important for the pharmacy of your brain as the breathing is that you were talking about earlier. And just before we take a little break, right, just in terms of neuroplasticity, what is that doing then? Like, I had a pathway that was fearful

and then it got less fearful to now the point that autonomously now, like I don't have to hype myself up before I come out here. I don't have to say to myself, you're going out to a crowd now. I i don't have to hype myself up before i come out here i don't have to say to myself you're going out to a crowd now i literally don't this is absolutely fine this is normal to me that part of my brain is gone yeah and the concept of being in front of an audience doesn't faze me one bit yeah so my something has literally changed in my brain yeah the the

amygdala is a big kind of emotion processing center in the middle of your brain both for fear and anger and in your previous self if you had thought about when you were 19 about doing this No, no, no, no.

Your amygdala would have just lit up the frontal lobes of your brain which is where you would engage in controlling your attention and thinking through problems, if you like, in a rational way, that would have been closed down. Your brain would have been in emergency mode. So because you have done this several times, each time you do it, your amygdala just activates

less and less. So it's like lifting weights. It's like lifting weights. But my brain. Yeah. Yeah. And just the pattern of synaptic connections in your brain has been changed largely by the things you do, also by the things you think, but behaviour is just critical.

And now, because you've done this so often, you just don't get that disruption from the anxiety centre of your brain, and so you're able to think about what you're doing, be the interviewer that you are, and be the comedian, thinker that you are. Thank you. But we were having such a good chat. We forgot about it. And one thing we were talking about backstage was the stuff that I'm talking about

up here that we're both talking about, about the process of going from being mentally unhealthy to being healthy. How do you create a society where that is just normal, that's available to everyone? And, you know, the seeming impossibility of how do you make that much resources available to people,

how do you make that many therapists, psychologists available, we already, if you take the beef industry, right, so we have industries that exist right now that are fucking mad unsustainable. a steak shouldn't cost a fiver right it should not if you look at a cow how much water that cow needs how much land that cow needs for its food to be grown we have an industry whereby for some reason a steak is fiver. So we've created this thing that seems utterly impossible, but we've done it in the service of capitalism. So yes, we can as a society, if you just change the mindset,

we can create an industry where there's these massive resources, but instead of it being valuing the price of a stake, it's valuing a person's emotional well-being. But the problem is, under capitalism, under consumerism, capitalism can't really exist in a mentally healthy society. Specifically, the wing of capitalism known as consumerism, which is advertising, right? If you listen to my podcast, you'd have heard me speaking about this before. A bar of soap, all soap does is it gets you clean.

That's all it does. And it can make you smell nice. But that's all that soap does. But if you look at an advert for like Dove or something like that, they're not, look at our soap, look how clean it's going to get you.

When was the last time you saw a soap ad that was talking about how clean it's going to get you? When was the last time you saw a soap ad that was talking about how clean it's going to get you? It doesn't. Soap sells you a better version of yourself. Most products that we purchase and how they're advertised to us, they don't sell us what they actually do. They're selling us a better version of ourselves.

A pair of shoes, a brand, a big fancy car, they're selling you a better version of yourself. If you're grounded as a human being and you've got an internal locus of evaluation and you feel okay with who you are, you know that a bar of soap isn't going to make you a better person. Do you get me? So capitalism exists and thrives on people being consistently insecure, people consistently being so unsure of themselves that we can get confused to think that a product will make us better as people. So thank you there to my guest, Professor Ian Robertson.

That was an absolutely fantastic chat. I hope you took something from that yourself. Apologies for the sloppiness in the audio this week or even the edit I'm away from my studio I have limited equipment it was difficult enough putting this together so apologies for that but that's that's the nature of this beast I can't be in my studio all the time I make this podcast myself I don't have a team of people and it was unexpected that I was away this week um dog bless I'll be back next week with a hot take and a lovely studio sounding podcast two of them rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.ご視聴ありがとうございました