The Blindboy Podcast - Talking to a Neuroscientist about the Human Brain

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Dr. Sabina Brennan is a neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. We chat about dementia, sleep hygiene, creativity, anxiety and depression, and how these things impact the human brain Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bonjour, you restless Declans, and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener to this podcast, if this is your first podcast, I recommend going back and listening to some earlier podcasts, or even starting at the start of the podcast. But you can really pick any episode you like, they're all different, and they're not sequential. But in doing so, you get to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast if you're a regular listener you know the crack how are you i hope you've had a lovely week the weather is getting much much better the days are longer the air smells better it's warmer it's at that level

of warmth where like i've got two cats out my garden, and when cats lie down in the warm sun with their bellies in the air, it looks like they're sweating. But I don't think they are sweating. I don't think cats can sweat. But it's definitely sweaty cat weather where a reclining cat in the May sun takes on the appearance of sweating. It's performative cat sweat weather. takes on the appearance of sweating it's performative cat sweat weather so i've got a a particularly nice treat for you this week in this week's podcast i sat down and i had a chat with a neuroscientist by the name of sabina brennan and sabina is she's a neuroscientist

she's a health psychologist and she's also a science communicator. And most importantly, she's an expert in her field, but she's incredibly passionate about the field that she's in, which is neuroscience. So this week's episode is going to be all about the human brain, the human brain. Because I speak about mental health on this podcast. But I don't know much about the actual brain. I speak about the abstraction of emotions. But Sabina is an expert in the actual human brain. And it's very, very fascinating. It's very fascinating.

And I learned quite a lot of stuff I did not know about before. Sabina is also a podcast host. She hosts a podcast called The Superbrain Podcast. She is a best-selling author. She's written 100 Days to a Younger Brain and a book called Beating Brain Fog. So this podcast really is about the human brain and Sabina gives some wonderful insight and tips

into how we can train our brains and make them healthier and how our brains do the things they do and why we speak about anxiety depression creativity the importance of sleep, dementia, trauma, loads of stuff. And it was a very helpful conversation for me from kind of a self-help perspective. So one thing I would like to say before I get into this podcast, just to let you know that I'm kind of continually aware of this. So this podcast, I bring up cognitive behavioral therapy a couple of times. We mentioned mindfulness. I think we touch on the importance of exercise.

And I speak a lot about exercise, mindfulness, CBT. And these things are incredibly helpful for me. They really work for me and that's why I speak about them. But like in the context of a mental health pandemic let's just call it that because that's what it is in the context of a mental health pandemic in Ireland and also in the context of we don't really have a robust mental health system at the moment a lot of people feel failed by the mental health system a lot of people can't access the appropriate mental health services that they need there's very long queues in that context sometimes things like mindfulness exercise cbt

they can be quite insulting to people because lots of people go to their doctors or go to professionals and say I'm suffering and because services aren't adequate often people are just told do some mindfulness, do some exercise or do some CBT because you can read that out of a book

and that approach is really failing a lot of people the thing is with mental health or with mental illness, everyone is unique and people need an approach that suits their individual needs, which is overseen by a professional or a full team of mental health professionals. So when you start roaring, start start shouting out exercise mindfulness cbt that's not very helpful to someone who's in a severe sense of crisis like somebody who might be dealing with complex issues around trauma or something like that telling them go home and do

some cbt via self-help or do some mindfulness you know look up some mindfulness videos on youtube some mindfulness you know look up some mindfulness videos on youtube that's really inappropriate and a sign of a system that's in failure so i'd like you to know that that's in my awareness when i speak about these things and also i'd ask of you because this is a kind of a trend i'm seeing online don't get angry with cbt exercise or mindfulness don't get angry with these things because they are helpful like cbt is an evidence-based approach so don't get angry with these things get angry with a system that is presenting these things as the only solution because of a lack of resources do you get me i say this too because I'm aware that. There's people who listen to this podcast.

Because their doctors have told them to listen to this podcast. I get mails every so often. Where people will say. I came to your podcast because my counsellor told me to listen to you. Or my doctor told me to listen to you. Because they say blind boy speaks about mental health. Listen to him it might help. Now that's fantastic

I love to think that me speaking about my experiences can help some people but on the other hand that's really sad and troubling because I'm not a mental health professional I studied a little bit but I'm just someone with a plastic bag on his head who speaks about their own experiences and it upsets me that sometimes people are sent to this podcast because the alternative is a six-month queue to get appropriate services it shouldn't be the case and I'd like people to listen to this podcast in conjunction with appropriate with receiving appropriate services for their individual needs and i never want to be mr mindfulness mr exercise mr cbt i understand that these things don't work for everybody and it can be quite insulting to somebody who needs something much more robust

and tailored for them like i did nearly two years of psychotherapy with a professional like talk therapy before I was able to even consider something like CBT because when I entered therapy I didn't have any language for my emotions I didn't know what I was feeling I was experiencing agoraphobia I was in real crisis and talk therapy over time got me to a point where I was then in the position to help myself with exercise, mindfulness, CBT but it was only through access to services in college that I got to that point. So I don't want to interrupt the chat I'm having with Sabina with the mid-podcast advert that Acast inserts so we're going to have our little ocarina pause right now

before I get into the chat, okay? I'm going to use a shaker instead of an ocarina this week to mix things up so you're going to hear an advert now that was the shake 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.m 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 Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre 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. You would have heard an advert there for some products you may or may not need. I don't know. The advert was digitally inserted. I don't know what it was.

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and about things that we can do to help our brains and to help our emotions so here's the chat Dr. Sabina Brennan check her out check out her podcast the super brain podcast and her website which is sabinabrennan.ie, where you can see all her books and stuff. All right, Sabina Brennan, you are a neuroscientist. And before we get into the chat, can you just describe to me what is a neuroscientist? Yeah, that's a good question. It's actually kind of an umbrella term. actually kind of an umbrella uh you know term it's and and it describes anybody i suppose academics anybody who studies the relate that the human brain physiologists uh people looking at physical aspects of the brain it can you know microbiologists you know people from all angles but i'm actually

a health psychologist and my interest is the relationship between the brain and human behavior. I'm just interested in what makes us do what we do and be who we are. I'm just fascinated, actually. I love people and I'm kind of well, no, that's a lie. I don't love people. I love understanding I love understanding what you know why people do what they do and the brain holds all the answers as far as I'm concerned is it fair to say is it is is it is neuroscience the person who deals with the physical parts of the computer rather than the software um no well no well that's kind of a good analogy because they often use that analogy in neuroscience you know that you have the hardware and the software so like your your brain you know the

neurons and the connections between it being the hardware and then the software being what you do with it you know the cognitive functions like you know memory and thinking and emotions um but it's kind of artificial link because they are all one do you know that kind of way so no people kind of people study different aspects i suppose some people physiologists and and um other sort of more what they'll call wet sciences you know people in a laboratory looking at you know looking at a number of the cells and how they work and like do you ever have to look at an actual brain no i don't you see no no so what well well that's a lie i don't look at an actual physical brain but like say my phd

was um and i get the title now hang on um neurophysiological and electrophysiological no neurocognitive and electrophysiologist electrophysiological indices of cognitive function in aging so basically i actually looked being a euphemism for um looked at the human brain looked at the electrical activity in the human brain so you know like you can get a knee cg for your heart you know where they put those stickers on your heart and they can see um the electrical functioning in your brain in your heart and well that's kind of what I did for my PhD stuck sort of 64 electrodes on people's heads and looked at the electrical activity in their brain as they carried out memory tests and attention tests and all sorts of different activities and so whilst you can kind of see lines going up and down when you're recording that you

actually then have to take it away and do this huge kind of mathematical really boring analysis to look for patterns that are linked to when somebody was doing a particular thing like remembering a specific word yeah this is something i'd like to know about actually so i i saw someone getting brain surgery on the tv yeah it was real but the person was like a violin player yeah and they operated on their brain while the person was playing violin what's that about well i haven't seen it, but I know certainly before you have brain surgery. So like say people who have epilepsy may need to have brain surgery because they have the electrical signal in their brain. I should say to people before we kind of go a bit further, because I don't know whether your listeners know how the brain kind of works and how. But basically, you've got 86 billion neurons in your brain 86 billion brain

cells and trillions of connections and they communicate with each other and with the cells and the rest of your body through electrical and chemical signals so that's how the brain works it's really really incredible um and so um basically what you were saying sort of about surgery. So if someone, say, has epilepsy, the electrical signaling goes haywire, you know, and they might get they have too much electrical activity going. It's like an electrical storm and they have their fit and things go wrong. So sometimes they want to go in and do a little bit of surgery on that. on that but um they have to be very careful that if they're operating on the brain they don't actually you know damage a part of the brain that's critical to your brain functioning and i mean obviously you need every part of your brain but the thing is with the brain roughly speaking

we know where different activities takes place so like language will be roughly in the same place in my brain as it is in your brain but because your brain is constantly changing right so you're not stuck with the brain you were born with right in fact you've really got a completely different brain from the brain you were born with because your brain is constantly changing and it's your behaviors your experiences the life choices that you make that can shape your brain could we compare it to a muscle in any way like if i do a bunch of exercises for my chest i will grow my chest yes if i neglect my arms i won't grow my arms yes is the brain similar yes it's not a muscle it's not a muscle but it is absolutely similar yes so basically what you have is the brain has this incredible capacity to learn.

That's how we have evolved as a species. We have adapted and changed to our environment. So adapting and changing to your environment is learning. That's what learning is. OK, so basically, the brain has this incredible capacity to adapt and change with learning. And that's called neuroplasticity. so the brain is described as being plastic so not credit card plastic think of mala you know plasticine that you pulled and played around with in school but basically in response to learning new information or experiencing something new in the environment and your brain has the

capacity to grow new connections and that actually is what physically changes the architecture of your brain so if you actually you just mentioned a musician there so um you know the areas in the brain of a musician who is constantly practicing you know music will be very different to that area in someone like me who doesn't play music. Like there's a fabulous study, and I love quoting this study because it was carried out by an Irish woman in the UK. And it's a very well known study, but it kind of explains, helps to explain neuroplasticity in a really simple way. In fact, I made a little animation of it. So if you want to throw in the show notes, I'll kind of say, you know, just look up superbrain.ie. of it so if you want to throw in the show notes i'll kind of say you know just look up superbrain.ie there's lots of little animations but this one explains a study that was done on london taxi

drivers so basically this woman mary mcguire um the studies had been done looking at a part of the brain in homing pigeons it's called a hippocampus and it's involved in learning and memory and it's also involved in what we call spatial navigation. So that's you just, you know, walking around in the environment, sitting in the environment like that's your brain is doing that. It's constantly looking and making judgments about where you are relative to that wall or that door or whatever. So they noticed that the hippocampus in homing pigeons was much bigger than the hippocampus in regular pigeons who don't race and go home. And so that alerted them to that.

Are they separate breeds or is it just one pigeon trained? I have no idea. That's a really brilliant question. I have no idea. But I think, yeah, I think homing pigeons are just trained, but I would imagine they breed them then as well. But I think, yeah, I think homing pigeons are just trained, but I would imagine they breed them then as well. But I would imagine they originally came from, you know, just regular pigeons. But that's something I must look up. But anyway. So that kind of led to them realizing, OK, that's involved in spatial navigation. And similarly, there's lots of fab little stories about, you know, birds that hide their food in the wintertime. Little stories about, you know, birds that hide their food in the wintertime.

You know, it grows when they actually have to, you know, hide food for storage so that they can spatially map it, you know, know where to go back to. Anyway, go back to the London taxi driver. She decided that she wanted to do sort of a similar study in humans. So basically she compared the brains of london taxi drivers with the brains of london bus drivers so the difference being that london bus drivers just go around same route every single day whereas london taxi drivers have to learn an incredible amount of of maps they really have to you know, they train for years and they have to go around it anyway. The hippocampi, because you have two

of them, so that's the Latin and the plural, the hippocampi in London taxi drivers is bigger than those in London bus drivers. And she went on to do a whole load of... Because bus drivers have routes. They just have routes that they follow where the taxi drivers actually, you know, they're challenging their their brain they have to keep learning those roots and keep

using them so so i'm just thinking there about the london taxi drivers so i've been using a smartphone since 2011 yeah and i kinda i've forgotten what it's like to have to remember things. Yeah. Because I have Google. Yeah. So even if I see, Jesus, because I was recounting a situation when I was about 20 and I was in a nightclub and I didn't have a smartphone. And I heard a song that I loved. I'd heard a song that I loved and I'd heard it for the first time. I'd heard a song that I loved and I'd heard it for the first time and I remember having to write it down on my hand and then shielding my hand for the rest of the night because I would never hear that song again there was no way to google there was nothing there was no Shazam and it was alien

to me to think that I had to do something like that because now I'd have just pressed the button on my phone it would have identified the song wouldn't have to worry about it. And I've been living my life like this for quite some time now, for over a decade, where basically it's like, I don't have to remember that. My phone will do it. I don't have to recall that phone. I used to remember phone numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I used to remember my bank account numbers. Yeah. You know, because I'm a lot older than you. So, like, I lived a longer life, you know, because i'm a lot older than you so like um i lived a longer life um uh you know with none of that's like 12 digits yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you knew everything you knew everybody's phone number you knew your bank account details um loads of those numbers and in fact older people are better at remembering those things than than younger people are now and what's that doing to our collective neuroplasticity okay no so so okay so that's not impacting what that's

doing is and i often get actually asked this question you know um so basically as regards to the use of devices i mean i outsource my memory all the time okay is that what you call it outsourcing i call it outsourcing memory i like a piece of advice I actually give to people if they're feeling overloaded and, you know, our brain fog. A lot of people are feeling a lot of brain fog during the pandemic. I say, look, outsource your memory to your devices. You know, the minute someone makes an appointment, you know, the minute you said to me, you know, we'll do two o'clock or whatever. I put it straight into my diary because then I don't have to remember it. know we'll do two o'clock or whatever i put it straight into my diary because then i don't have to remember it so here's the thing there is no problem with outsourcing your memory to

devices provided you use the resources that you have freed up in your brain to do something else to learn new things to be creative to do whatever so basically what you want to do to have a really healthy brain and to optimize your brain performance is harness this neuroplasticity okay bigger is better when it comes to your brain and i mean really in important ways and you know say even in later life if you were to get a disease the pathology in your brain of something like dementia, Alzheimer's disease, the more healthy brain you have, the longer you can resist the impact of that disease on your brain. So the longer you can hold on to your cognitive functioning before the symptoms that you associate with dementia appear. So you want as many connections in your brain. You know, actually, if you're over the age of 30

your brain starts to shrink through a process called atrophy so you lose a little bit of brain volume every year and then by the age of 60 that starts to accelerate so if your brain shrinks your cognitive capacity the ability of your brain to do all the things you want to do will suffer as well but can we fight this yes we, we can. Okay. Oh, I sounded like Obama there. Yes, we can. Yeah, we can. And that's what makes me so excited and passionate about what I do and about trying to tell people that. So yes, you can counteract that atrophy if you engage in things that promote brain health. So one of those is harnessing neuroplasticity. And that's why constantly learning things

is absolutely brilliant for your brain. Now, everybody tends to think when you say learning, they think about academic learning and learning as a sort of something that you had to do in school that was awful. That's not the kind of learning I'm talking about. Although if you want to do academic learning, that's perfectly fine but it can be learning anything you know musical instrument uh you know how to turn wood uh the lyrics of a song you know just learning anything

knitting doesn't matter i find from that passion is really important but that's from my experience if i'm passionate about something i'll consolidate that to my memory. Yeah. So actually, that passion that you're talking about, and I did a podcast episode on this because I am absolutely passionate about what you're talking about, which is really curiosity. So in that case, right? So it means something that you are intrinsically curious about, something that you just have a natural curiosity for. Learning is enhanced for that. So neuroplasticity is actually enhanced when you're naturally curious about something. So when you're naturally curious about, as you just said there, it's so easy to learn.

You actually don't even have to put any effort into it. OK, it's just fun. It's not even learning. It's just fun. And it is learning because your brain is is is actually growing those new connections and and the thing is that's really exciting and i said that in my in my podcast teachers take bloody note the thing is if you are naturally curious about something the learning is enhanced and then if you stop doing the thing that you're curious about and turn your attention to something that maybe you're less curious about that enhanced learning continues for a period so like i think teachers should you know let kids explore whatever they're curious about for 10-15 minutes and then teach them their theorems do you know what i mean like harness like we do an awful lot of stuff to suit a regular

society instead of actually understanding how our brains work and then you know harnessing or capitalizing that like teenage um teenagers are are a prime kind of example of society kind of trying to push square pegs into round holes when you're a teenager from puberty your brain goes through a second period of incredible development so the first period is from about the age of two to seven so from puberty to up to about the age of 25 your brain is actually almost completely remodeled neuropluroplasticity is enhanced. It's a brilliant time to learn new stuff. That's why sort of academic stuff does work okay at that period of time.

But it actually, it's remodeled from the back to the front. And the front part of the brain is the latest to develop. And that's why teens are very vulnerable to taking risk. They're vulnerable to mental health issues because they engage in the world from more from their emotional brain, which is unthinking and reflexive rather than reflective. And so teens need a lot of minding. And I think teens need a lot more parenting than we're doing at the moment because their brain is incomplete and because they can't think rationally and also the brain while it's going through this period doesn't actually learn from mistakes it doesn't learn from negative experiences so people will continue

to make those same mistakes so they need kind of guidance and support but what i wanted to say there is um the our natural, our circadian rhythms, you know, when we're naturally awake is also related to when we're most alert and when we can better learn, when we can take new information in, et cetera. So the teen brain is alert at different times to, say, the brain of someone like me who's in her 50s now. And so basically, teens actually, they're wide awake in the evening time, you know, and, you know, kind of afternoon is when they're sharpest. And, you know, most teens want to stay up late and their parents are telling them to go to bed because they've got to get up for school in the morning.

The thing is, the teenage brain should be sleeping first thing in the morning. And school really shouldn't start till kind of about 11 o'clock. You know, if you were to actually harness their natural rhythms. So you're kind of forcing their brain to do stuff when it's not the right time for that brain to be doing it. And school hours probably exist just to accommodate capitalism. Just to accommodate. when it's not the right time for that brain to be doing it. And school hours probably exist just to accommodate capitalism. Just to accommodate, yeah, yeah, pretty much everything. Yeah, it's just to accommodate a society rather than actually to kind of work with our natural rhythms. And you've got to understand, these things were set up before we really understood

how the brain works. Like it's really only in the last 30 years or so that we actually have the technology to understand a functioning brain. So like there's MRI, functional MRI scanners, the electrophysiology that I did,

diffusion tensor imaging. These can all see the brain while it's actually engaging in activities. And when I say see the brain, you know, they can, you know, people, physicists and all those really, really smart people can, you know, they can make pictures and maps from the electrical signals. So you can kind of see which parts of the brain are firing when you engage in different activities like you even have things like place cells which are fascinating they only fire when you're in a particular part of the room like it's what yeah google it folks right um yeah if you google there's videos online of place cells and and literally they're particular cells that that fire when you go to a particular part of the room. What are the parameters of this part of the room that makes the brain do this?

Is it your personal relationship with that part of the room? Yeah, yeah. So the brain really is just all about patterns. That's why, you know, routine is critical for mental health. It really is. The brain loves patterns and it functions really well when you have regular routines there's kind of there's kind of a fine line between so a lot of people will you know when they're giving advice about mental health will say you know um we're living too much of

our lives on autopilot and we need to be more present in the moment and that is really true present-mindedness is absolutely a brilliant way to keep anxiety and depression at bay because anxiety and depression. Why is that? Why is that? Well, anxiety and depression, number one, are all about imagining futures that might happen or, you know, ruminating over things that happened in the past. If you're present in the moment, you can't do that. And again, a lot of people talk about present mindedness and mindfulness and all that sort of thing personally i've struggled always struggled to meditate and

do that sort of thing my brain is just like crazy on fire all the time however that's not the only way you can be present minded it's not the only form of meditation you know that thing that you know where people sit and breathe. If you like you said there, say when you're passionate about something or, you know, maybe your music, you know, you talk about creative flow. It's when you're when you're in the flow, when you're lost. So what I say to people is find something that you absolutely love, something that you have fun doing, where if somebody was you can lose hours do you know yeah yeah you don't know what time you can even miss lunch do you know that kind of way because you're i need to ask you about that right because that's a huge part of my job and my life

yes so and aren't you lucky because that's really really brilliant for you i you know it's it's it's i swear to god it's the dragon that i chase chase. It's the actual, the meaning of my life. And what determines my happiness is the creative flow. And that's whether I'm writing my books or making music or whatever. But like, especially when I'm writing a short story. I could literally spend four hours and I feel as if I've left the country. I'm just not present. But you have. That's a lovely description.

Because that's what I'm trying to say to people is. But what is that like? Two things. Particularly during lockdown, a lot of people are stuck, even if they love people. You know, like a lot of the people we love, you kind of might spend a couple of hours

every evening with them and the weekends. And now you're 24-7 with them. Anybody is irritating after that period of time. And what I say to people is, look, you always have this room in your head. It's a room that nobody else can go into and you can lose yourself in there. And I really believe this kind of sounds a bit like an oxymoron. You've got to lose yourself to find yourself. That's and that's what I think you have found. You're blessed. You find yourself when you're in that flow.'m very fortunate i love what i do you know and

even when i'm talking like something like this or giving my talks i'm in my flow do you know what i mean i can't think of anything else and and my brain is you know just making connections and i'm really enjoying it so the really interesting thing about this um is so you know the way you sort of said you're chasing that dragon you you know, you're chasing, you know, to find that. Actually, sometimes if you stop chasing it, you'll find it much easier. So the reason I'll say that is, OK, so we're kind of a bit, how would I put it? put it uh and this is kind of hard to use language because um it's kind of complicated complex in that we think we think we exist independent of our brain and you know that's the illusion the brain kind of creates but the brain actually you are your brain that's it full

stop it creates you um from lots of different information um from your own thinking from what other people have said to you over the years from what's consciousness within all of that yeah so i think consciousness is um our it's our it's our thinking it is our awareness of who we are or who we think we are it is the stories that we tell ourselves i think um consciousness you see the thing is essentially we kind of have three brains um now they're interconnected um but they're frequently described as three brains because they evolved um you know over millions of years um so the first part of our brain to evolve was the reptilian brain. It's the brainstem.

So that's the part of the brain that keeps you alive. So the brainstem is the evolutionary, the oldest part of the brain, and it is unconscious, and it carries out all of the activities that keep us alive, okay? So breathing, heart rate, digestion digestion all of those things right so if you have an injury to your brain stem you're dead pretty much unless you have access to a life

support machine okay so that's critical now that's down at the stem it actually connects to your spinal cord okay and i can put an image of this up if people want afterwards on my social media or whatever but and then the next part of the brain to evolve is what we call the limbic brain or the limbic system and what most people refer to as the emotional brain. So that's what you're talking about. That's where your amygdala is. That's where the center of your fear response and your emotions are. And it is also unthinking, unconscious, reflexive for a lot of the things right particularly the amygdala is reflexive then on top of that so to see that limbic part of the brain you'd actually have to turn the brain upside down okay it's inside so then wrapped around that on the top is the crinkly part of the brain that most of us are used to thinking about when we think of a brain that

horrible beige crinkly bit and actually i'd say to your um to your listeners google rainbow okay like rainbow but brainbow and you will see some amazing images of the human brain from the cell perspective they are like um monet paintings they are really beautiful. And what they are is proteins used, different color dyes used to show different brain cells. And that's what I'd prefer people to think about when they think about the brain rather than that crinkly beige mask, because that just looks sort of dead. Well, it is. It only looks like that because it's been preserved in formaldehyde. But that crinkly part of your brain, that's the most recent to evolve. That is the thinking part of your brain that is involved in language, vision processing, movement, you know, conscious movement,

decision making, planning, organizing, all those things that make us human. And the very front part of that, the frontal lobes is the most complex part. It was the very last to evolve. It's the last part to develop. So in the teenage brain, it's the part that can assess risk. It's kind of connected to every other critical thinking. It's connected to every other part of your brain so we call it the executive controller because it kind of has oversight of everything so say for example if you talk about that fight or flight so if if you um so we say anxiety that's what i want to know so anxiety comes from stress so yeah i'm gonna so if i if do you mind if i just sort of start at the beginning go for it you know with the stress bit and then that will explain sort of the anxiety.

So basically, you hear a loud bang. OK. And without thinking, you either jump, scream, drop to the ground, depending or whatever. You know, it's a noise and you just have this reflexive response. OK, now that noise or whatever the threat is, the information, the sensory information, so the sound, visual, if it is visual, whatever, smell, if it's the smell of something burning, you know, that sensory information comes into your amygdala, the fear center, via two routes, a short route and a long route. Okay. So the first goes directly to your amygdala, the unthinking part of your brain so that you can jump out of the way or whatever of an oncoming car.

It just saves your life. That's it. You know, you don't have time to think about saving your life. Like just do it. And literally that's what the amygdala does. So then the slower route, the longer route, it eventually goes to the amygdala,. So then the slower route, the longer route, it eventually goes to the

amygdala, but it goes via the frontal lobes, the critical thinking part of your brain. And that part of your brain, as I said, has connections to all the rest of your brain and actually all of the other relevant information. And it then sends a message to the amygdala which is either look you know what um shut off that stress response it was only a car backfiring there's nothing to worry about we need to you know stop the release of cortisol and the brain has a fabulous feedback loose loop that does that will shut off the cortisol response and you can gradually bring your heart rate down what's the cortisol business yeah so that's all right i should explain that so once um once the stress response is kicked off by any sort of threat and actually i should explain that threat doesn't even have to be real it can

be imagined so you could be worrying about something and it will kick off this same physiological neurophysiological stress response So it starts in your brain and basically sends messages to your adrenal glands to release adrenaline. And then for cortisol, which is the main stress hormone to be released. Now you use you need cortisol. It isn't just released when you are in a stressful situation. Cortisol is released first thing in the morning to wake up when you wake up. It's the it's the hormone that actually allows you kind of get up out of bed after slumber so you know cortisol receptors all over your body so you know it's useful it's not like a bad thing um and and it's not a bad thing anyway because you need it you need it to escape a mug or whatever so the cortisol is released. And basically what happens is on unessential functions in your body are sort of shut down.

So things like your immune response, your digestion. Yeah. So that everything can go into. So your heart rate will speed up. Your lungs will expand so you can take in more oxygen. And so you can take in more oxygen. You'll start to sweat or whatever. But basically, you know, glucose will be produced into your limbs so that you can run or fight, whatever. So everything is and you go into high alert, you know, like your senses become heightened and it's a life preserving thing. So basically, if there's no need for it, then your thinking brain says, you know, shut this off. And, you know, it's got this lovely system where it can shut it down or it can say, actually, no, that was a gun. Right. Stay down on the ground. Look around. See if there's, you know, whatever. And we'll get you through that situation. And interestingly, memory in the hippocampus is

enhanced when you have an acute stress response now where this becomes problematic and where it can ultimately lead to anxiety is when stress becomes chronic yeah and a lot of us have been living through chronic stress during the pandemic you know you know aside from just the fear of catching the virus all the other stressors that have been increased you know stress uncertainty the The uncertainty, the sheer uncertainty. Uncertainty. So uncertainty is, you know, fundamental to anxiety, like it really is. And, you know, it's related to control. And so, you know, the perception of stress is occurs when we feel we don't have the capacity

to cope with the challenge that we are facing. Right. So basically, when stress becomes chronic, what happens is over time, neuroplasticity is increased in your amygdala. Okay. So your fear response becomes enhanced. Your amygdala actually gets bigger. enhanced your amygdala actually gets bigger it is unfortunately decreased in your hippocampus so your ability to learn and remember are decreased and your hippocampus starts to shrink it is also decreased in your frontal lobes so your ability to think critically and reflectively are reduced. And so over time, then, you are acting in a constant state of threat. You are on high alert.

You see threat even where there isn't any. Your emotional brain is just ruling the roost. So instead of your thinking brain calming down your emotional brain, if it's fired off, your emotional brain is pretty much shutting up your thinking brain. And then if that persists very long, you know, that can become sort of a full blown anxiety where, you know, your whole life is really ruled by your anxious thinking and your perceptions of threat and um on top of that stress and sleep are inextricably linked they have um um they both interfere with each other in that when you're critically stressed or chronically stressed um you have too much cortisol and you get night terrors and shit night terrors just yeah go everything going round and round and round and i you know when it happens me i can feel it in my fingertips and you know i feel like i've

too much energy in my legs you know and basically my body is ready to go running somewhere and i can't sleep um and so the less sleep you have the more susceptible you are to stress. And the more stress you have, the less sleep you have. It's a toxic feedback loop all around. It's a toxic feedback loop. And the thing is, though, as well, what's really interesting is that not everybody is. So that stress sleep relationship isn't equal across all individuals. So there's a thing called sleep reactivity and that just refers to how much stress impairs your sleep right so uh i have high if you have

high sleep reactivity that means that when you're stressed your sleep is going to be disrupted and and then someone with low stress reactivity, like my husband, even if the things were falling down around him, he can sleep. It doesn't impact on his ability to sleep. It doesn't mean that he isn't stressed when he is awake, but it doesn't impact on his ability to sleep. Now, women are more susceptible to, are more likely to have high sleep reactivity. People who have a family history of insomnia are also more likely to have high sleep reactivity. And there does seem to be some sort of genetic element as well. And then people who have high sleep reactivity are also more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety

and depression. Wow. And then also more likely to go on to develop insomnia disorder so that's why one of the things in in both my books i have full chapters on sleep and why you need sleep and why your brain needs sleep and why it is critical for it to be one of the things that you prioritize in your life you know if you care about your mental health you've really got to work on getting sufficient high quality sleep every night it will you know if you and i mean i know that sounds like saying yeah but i can't sleep but it really is about investing time and working on getting to a place where you can sleep it's not going to be an easy journey but there's tons of different things that you can do like i found the phone sabina like

since i've had a smartphone i haven't i've been i haven't been getting the sleep i used to get simply having a phone that i look into before bed no excites me too much no stop it stop it instantly right they're simple rituals really is that a straight up red flag for bad straight up red flag for bad sleep and the reason it's a red flag flag so you're saying it it um you know stimulates you the stuff that you're looking at but actually it's the blue that's part of it but the main thing is the blue light that comes out of your phone and it suppresses melatonin, which is a chemical in your brain that kind of calls you to sleep. So essentially, if you're looking at a blue light before you go to bed, your brain thinks it's daytime. OK. And it's not getting the message that you go asleep.

So, look, there's no there's no data to say when you know what's the exact time you should stop using your blue light. But what I say to people is, look, switch off any blue light emitting devices for an hour before your bedtime. Wow. Right. And Camille, I've heard that there's a relationship between poor quality sleep when you're younger and then developing things like Alzheimer's and dementia when you're older. Is that true? Yeah, there's a huge relationship between sleep and dementia and we don't know which way it goes around but poor sleep so poor sleep is critical for learning and memory okay so when you take information in during the

day it goes into that a temporary repository um uh the hippocampus right and that has limited resources so that's why when you get towards the end of the day and someone starts telling you something you say sorry can't take it now tell me tomorrow i need to go to sleep it's full basically okay so um when you go to sleep so you basically cycle through five 90 minute cycles if you're getting you know a full night's sleep yeah through each of those cycles you have non-REM sleep and REM sleep, but of different proportions in each cycle. So at the start of the night, you've more non-REM sleep than REM sleep.

But by the time you get to your last cycle, you've much more REM sleep than non-REM sleep. So that's your dream sleep. So that's when you're getting most of your dreaming. So at the start of the night, we see electrical activity between the hippocampus and the frontal lobes that I talked to you about, the executive controller. And what we believe is happening there is that your frontal lobes are filtering the information that you took in during the day. And they're saying, yeah, no, dump that,

dump that. Oh, yeah, we need to make that a memory. Dump that, keep that, keep that, right? Because we can't keep everything that we take in. Your brain a limited capacity so then a little bit later in the night we see um i'm making hand movements here and because you got you can't see me but basically um you know you don't have a place in your brain where memories are stored they're stored in electrical patterns. OK, so those patterns, we see patterns of electric, electrical activity going across various areas, areas of your brain. And that's that new information

starting to be made, consolidated into a memory. And actually one little tip, if you want to really make sure that you remember stuff, engage as many senses as you possibly can. That's something that's beaten out of us when we go to

school if you look at any toddler they explore the world with every sense yeah they taste stuff they touch it they roll in it you know they smell it they do everything and then they go to school and they're told lava trassna you know cross your hands sit down sit still and just listen. And so you're minimizing, you know, it's a very, like the more senses you engage when you're living in the world makes it richer, but it also enriches the memory. And so then when that's been sort of bedded down in your brain at night, it's been bedded across various different senses. And so actually actually even if you go on in later life to develop something like dementia and your language centers are damaged and not functioning you still have access to those memories via your sensory other senses you know and so it's really important i really encourage people to engage and also it's a you

know it makes your life richer anyway so one little question I'm going to ask before I get back to the other part was, so I get asked so much about sleep hygiene. It's my listeners to my podcast. It's one thing they're very concerned about because everyone's using their phone. And I think most people are aware that the phone is what's messing with their sleep. Now, I've been doing this for nearly 10 years. So that's now I'm concerned, we'll say. I've been doing this for nearly 10 years.

So that's now I'm concerned with say, have I done damage to my brain? Or can I, if I improve my sleep hygiene now, can I fix it? Yeah, yeah, of course. The brain is really resilient. So it has this other capacity as well called, I kind of, I like to describe it like if you adopt a brain healthy lifestyle, it's like investing in brain capital that you can cash in at some point in the future to cope with or compensate for challenges in life.

And that challenge could be something like COVID and the pandemic. It could be aging. It could be a brain injury or it could be a disease like dementia in later life or a disease like multiple sclerosis that hits people in earlier life right and so what we know from research is that that resilience so some people can have alzheimer's disease but not have the symptoms they are resilient to the disease and that resilience is linked to lifestyle factors okay so they're the pillars of what so so you know my books are about brain brain health and about beating brain fog and the fundamental principles principles of brain health you know getting good quality sleep is a primary is is one of the key ones so it is critical it is important that people are worried about it because at least that might spur them to take action the world health organization has declared long before the pandemic a sleep loss epidemic with one in three people not getting

enough sleep and actually since the pandemic apparently there's been a 20 rise in the prescription of sleeping tablets which is not something that's um a great idea because you think that's because of increased anxiety or just people being lethargic because they're not moving i think it's a combination of things to be perfectly honest yes i think stress the chronic stress is going to impair sleep i think um uh the loss of routine is going to interfere with that um i think if people have lost jobs under stimulation is going to interfere with that exercise or lack of exercise um is going to interfere with that so it's going to be multiple factors. But most of the brain healthy stuff kind of covers everything.

But if you go back to the sleep thing, so light is absolutely, managing your exposure to light is a critical way to improve your sleep. So the minute you wake in the morning, open your shutters or curtains or whatever you have. If it's the wintertime in Ireland and it's dark, turn on a white light. OK, not a blue light. Don't open your laptop or whatever. And you've got to understand our brain evolved over millions of years. We only have electric light for a couple of hundred years. We only have these devices for like. So our brain is looking for signals from light to get a proper sleep routine.

So I'm saying to people as well, and this might be something to do with the pandemic as well. And the disruption is sleep is that people are working from home and some people aren't leaving their homes at all. So you need to get out in daylight. I say to people a minimum of half an hour, but like, you know, more if you can. OK, and then in the evening time, you've got to take control of the electrical light in your house. So I would suggest that from about eight o'clock in the evening, dim your lights. If you have a dimmer switch or, you know, put on lamps, turn off the overhead light. If you're on a budget like I picked up a couple of lamps and duns the other day for 10 euro. You know, they don't you know, it's not going to break the bank it really isn't but it will really improve your sleep if you start to lower those candles are lovely candles are lovely they're

also really relaxing if you uh you know have a nice one that's a calming smell so that's another thing then and then when you go to bed you're going to make sure that your room is really as dark as it possibly can be. So another thing that I suggest to people is often one of the last things that people do before they go to bed is brush their teeth. They're tired. You go up the stairs, they turn out the bright light in the bathroom and brush their teeth and wake up the brain. So what I say to people is, look, so kind of in my new book, I have like um a whole week you know that's just devoted to sleep sleep rituals that you can gently introduce into your life to help you um sleep well and one of the suggestions i say is you start a wind down routine from about an hour before bed okay so put the devices away and go upstairs get into your pjs your comfies or whatever and brush your teeth then

okay yeah you're done don't eat anything after that anyway it's not good eating late at night will upset your sleep as well then come back downstairs

as you said light your candles or you have your lower light or whatever listen to relaxing music read a paperback book do you know what I mean that's important.

Literally, that's a huge thing I've been doing, going back to an actual physical book rather than my Kindle or reading a book on my laptop. Yeah, yeah. A piece of paper. Or have a bath or, you know, indulge yourself by putting some cream on yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know, just look, think about it. If you have children and you're trying to induce a routine, you know, you calm them down. You don't take them from running wild around the house and say, now go to bed. You have a wind down routine for the child. And sometimes that involves having a bath. Yeah. You know, whatever. So really make that.

And it's nice. It's nice to take time out to just do some of that nice sort of restorative stuff. It helps calm everything, everything down a bit. Another thing that's really important that a lot of people aren't aware of. So temperature is almost as important or as important as light when it comes to getting good sleep. So given the kind of climate we live in, you know, a lot of people will turn the heat on in the bedroom before they go up or they may even have electric blankets and i want to be nice and cozy in my bed and and you know they want to make the room really warm actually you need to turn your heat off from about an hour before you go to bed and sabina what about

like we're mentioning phones there and the light but also most of us when we're on our phone we're looking at social media yeah yeah so that's social media is all about high arousal emotions whether it's making you angry or anxious or whatever so cut that out and similarly so a lot of people will say you know oh god i'm so wrecked after work or i'm so stressed can't wait to go home when we even used to go you know when we had a workplace to go to or whatever can't wait to go home and watch watch Netflix and chill now the research shows that even just two hours watching Netflix or some other show or program or whatever actually increases anxiety and depression rather than reduces them and just think of the nature of the stuff you're watching obviously you could choose

carefully like so I would tend if I don't watch very much television at all to be perfectly honest but if i did and if i did watch a switch off i'll i'll watch things that kind of give me comfort maybe like homes being decorated or you know because i kind of like that stuff um or listen to a nice podcast i listen to a nice podcast they're brilliant i i i talk about them you know in in my book and they're a great way to send you sleep as well i know that sounds awful but i have fallen asleep while listening oh jesus i get people listening to a full eight hours of my podcast and they're not even awake yeah yeah but that's good you know if it kind of you know if it kind of gets you asleep but the temperature thing is your core body temperature has to drop by one degree before you can actually go into sleep so if you've got a hot room you've

no chance of that happening so um really you want to be thinking of a cool room and one way to do that is actually counterintuitively to have a hot bath and okay because when you step out of a hot bath into the cool air of the bathroom um the heat is drawn from your core to your extremities uh to heat them up so that actually will reduce your core temperature because it's your core temperature you want to um you want to reduce before you go to sleep um so that's kind of another another sort of tip that people aren't aware of exercise is a brilliant way to boost sleep uh but not near bedtime absolutely nowhere near um nowhere near bedtime um uh you know but um yeah no it's critical there's one thing i wanted so just to take it back to something you were speaking about earlier so when you were speaking about

um the amygdala and the emotional part of the brain and how when when we're stressed how the emotional part of the brain can take over yes so i when i was like 1920 i had pretty bad anxiety which then developed into agoraphobia so i was right so you live in a room for like a year and oh my god the thought of like being in like a pub or a supermarket yeah it was just like not a not a hope i'm gonna get an anxiety attack yeah but i don't live that like that's a distant memory yeah I went to psychotherapy but also what was very important for me cognitive behavioral therapy and how I used it myself yes to challenge my beliefs and change my behavior and then to basically become a person who's mentally healthy and doesn't exist with unhealthy anxiety can you explain so that took me about a year yeah and the most important thing for me was whatever about and doesn't exist with unhealthy anxiety. Can you explain?

So that took me about a year. And the most important thing for me was whatever about changing my beliefs about, you know, the supermarket isn't going to give me anxiety. It was when I actually went and changed my behaviour and started going to the supermarket and gradually exposing myself that that's when I truly felt change.

Now for me me that was all very abstract because i'm looking at it from a psychology point of view i'm not thinking about my brain yeah can you tell me for as a neuroscientist what's happening there in the physical brain yeah so basically your brain really operates on patterns okay um and that's what our behaviors are you know and that's actually who we are we are patterns of behavior um you know and and when they change we change do you know what i mean um uh so and and so does your brain so kind of to explain a little bit i have to explain that your brain it only weighs two percent of your body right but it consumes about 25 percent of the oxygen and nutrients that you take in at circulating at any one time that's your brain's

fuel okay yeah now um it's the thinking part of your brain the crinkly part the part that develops last is the highest consumer of brain fuel okay yeah so anything and you know it yourself engaging in any of those activities that require you to solve problems to think critically you'd be starving and we must go back to your creativity because i do want to answer that um uh yeah so it really uses a lot of resources so your brain in order to be efficient and effective constantly scans your behaviors for patterns that it can automate oh wow to save energy yeah to save energy holy fuck yeah so it automates behavior and hands over responsibility for those patterns of behavior to uh your emotional brain to a part of it called the um basal ganglia okay and so basically then your emotional brain to a part of it called the basal ganglia.

OK, and so basically then your thinking brain, it just it does. It's like like a bookend. It kind of checks it, you know, checks in at the beginning. Yeah, that's that behavior. Basal ganglia will do it. And it checks in at the end. Yeah, that worked fine. OK. So basically, pre-pandemic, 40% of our behaviors were automated. They were our habits. For most people, you know, it could be, say they get up at 7am, it could be 10am before they actually consciously, you know, really engage in a thinking behavior because they get up, they pee, they brush their teeth, shower, breakfast, commute, whatever. It's all pretty much done on autopilot.

Now, a lot of people, when they're talking about mental health, say we live too much of our lives on autopilot. That's probably true, but it is essential that we live some of our lives on autopilot. And about 40% is pretty good. And that allows you to use your brain for those other more complex activities, for your writing, your music or whatever. So you need routine and habits. That's one of the reasons people have been feeling really stressed or their brain fog, they just feel they're not working possibly properly, is that like a year ago, just one day, everybody was told to go home and figure out how to work. And people just dropped all of their routines. And most people didn't engage in any regular behavior so they

might get up at 10 o'clock today seven o'clock tomorrow they might homeschool for an hour first thing in the morning and so that's exhausting so that's exhausting and your brain can't see any patterns to automate it can't fix the problem why am i tired and i'm not leaving the house when i'm why am i tired when i'm doing less than I used to do? Well, you're tired because you are not engaging in routines. So the solution is simple. Just reintroduce all your routines. And I'm saying to people, introduce a fake commute because it's really important to bookend that work, you know, to separate work from home in some sort of way.

So that's a really, really sort of simple solution so um now going back to the patterns so you have patterns of thinking okay but they're like those habits they were just habits so something would trigger and you'd go down that that thinking you know oh i can't leave the house because of this so i can't do this because then before you know it i literally i'm trapped in my room but you're trapped in a behavior so what i think is really liberating about that is you go okay so that means i need to just re i need to create a new habit of thinking do you know what i mean now creating a new habit is effort full because you have to actively so even if you're talking about something like you know you want to stop

say you eat chocolate after lunch every day yeah okay it's probably been an automated thing you just reach for the bar of chocolate or you go down to the shop and buy the bar of chocolate whatever after lunch and it's unthinking and habit. So to break that, you have to very actively resist that chocolate, not go or replace what you do then with something else that's not eating the chocolate, like going for a run or whatever. And that's going to be really hard, but only for a certain period of time. Now, that period of time, on average, you know, it really just depends on the activity. If it's a simple thing that you haven't been doing for very long, you know,

you can swap it out and put in a new habit relatively quickly. If it's something that's been in grade for years, it's going to take more work and longer. But basically, what you've got to do is actively engage your thinking brain, that frontal lobes, and you've got to inhibit your behavior actively, you know, and you've got to inhibit your behavior actively you know and say don't eat that chocolate what i'd like to raise with you there right so so i i used so i did that via cbt yes exactly i'm also conscious of the fact that that worked for me and yes it was difficult but there are people people who would have what would be described as we say personality disorders or things like that, where CBT fails them. Yes. The ability to simply make choices and repattern and think rationally, it doesn't work for these people or people with trauma.

Can you speak about that and what's going on with the brain there? I think you're kind of moving into then a different realm when you talk about personality disorders, etc. kind of moving into then a different realm when you talk about personality disorders etc i'm talking about um you know i'm talking about sort of the human brain in a sense in that is kind of we'll say for want of a better word wired pretty much similarly you know going into you know those kind of things and schizophrenia they're kind of a different realm and in a way they're outside my remit and i would kind of rather not okay i get you but i'm very happy to go there with the trauma what i would like to do is could i ask a very basic question okay and you can choose to not answer it if it's not it with in that territory of mental

mental illness or schizophrenia or personality disorders is there evidence that the physical brain is different um or even the pathways are different so the yeah so the thing is there can be um but the thing is what's really you know you see it's our behaviors our life experience that wire our brain you know that shape it so is it are we a blank slate no we're not a blank slate then that's a very good way to describe it so obviously we have you know part of the brain that you know the occipital lobes at the back of your brain they're involved in um processing visual information you know on the left side you have where your language centers are etc so like you have your basic brain so to speak it's wired for all those kind of functions.

But, you know, like an infant needs to be stimulated, do you know? And between the ages of two and seven, the shaping of that brain will be influenced by the kind of stimulation or lack of stimulation that it has had. Because part of this, so say when we go to the teenage brain,

so it's remodeled. So what actually happens is parts of the brain that have not parts of the brain but neurons and connections that haven't been regularly used are pruned away okay so there's growth and there's pruning so it's really critical in those periods that you you know you engage with the world and that you develop like that you teach kids how to do various things or engage in various activities so that those those neurons aren't pruned away or that they are actually you know that you're shaping and enhancing kind of ones that will serve them well and you you you mentioned trauma there yeah what does childhood trauma do to the brain,

even into adulthood? Yeah, it's very, very relevant in that if you've been exposed to trauma, your stress response may be disproportionate compared to someone who's not been exposed to trauma. And what's the difference between trauma and a bit of a fright or something i think a bit of a fright is part of uh the learning curve of life you know and i think

that's why it's important as well that you know you know people are exposed to experiences you know like i think it's mad sometimes you know where people just put you know oh you're an adult now 18 out in the world and actually really you know you you need to learn about challenges and you know bits of frights or taking risk um in a safe way do you know what I mean because your body will learn how to cope with those or what works or what doesn't you know in a safe space I think you know a bit of a fright is, you know, your body, your brain will learn about that fright and it will it will remember that fright and it will know that, OK, don't do that again because that's what will happen. Or here's how you coped with that before. And it may be that you had somebody who helped you cope with that fright you know helped you through it and with a trauma or a severe trauma you know where you're talking about childhood abuse and and those kind of things and kids navigating navigating a childhood where um

you know uh you know maybe where there's violence and they're learning to adapt their behavior so that they don't instigate you know and and i mean that in just the you know the maybe where there's violence and they're learning to adapt their behavior so that they don't instigate, you know, and I mean that in just the, you know, the sense, like not saying that they're any responsibility for, you know, for violence being, you know, brought on them, but they're learning how to they're making connections. Their brain is making connections and going, OK, when he hit mum that time, it was because I did such and such. Do you know children have a way to blame themselves? when he hit mum that time, it was because I did such and such. Do you know?

And children have a way to blend themselves. Yes. And that's where, you know, that's where actually sort of, sort of inappropriate links are made. You know, your brain's not infallible. It will, it looks for patterns, but particularly your emotional brain, it's not very good at distinguishing patterns. So it'll often make incorrect links.

Yeah. Okay. So your thinking brain is very good at connecting patterns, but your emotional brain isn't necessarily. And so you can make these silly you can make these silly connections. Like, you know, if you take a simple example, like a goalkeeper, you know, maybe save six penalties when he had his green socks on. You know, the green socks have nothing to do with that, but they want to wear the green lucky socks or whatever, you know. So there's we all do those kind of erroneous connections. When you have had trauma as a child, your stress response is going to be activated,

you know, in a different way and not, you know, either you will have a stress response much sooner. You'll have it to, you know, things that maybe other people wouldn't. I mean, I know of people, actually even you have a relative who kind of grew up in, you know, kind of one of those institutions. And like, I speak very loudly because both of my parents were deaf, not totally deaf, but they had very, very poor hearing. And like she always, she would kind of actually literally kind of jump back from my voice and make me feel very guilty, you know. But that loud noise was kind of, you know, a bit of a trigger kind of for her.

So everybody will be different. And I think also people who have been exposed to trauma most probably have post-traumatic stress disorder as well so it's a disordering of the trauma and the reverse can happen too i believe you know where um uh the stress response becomes suppressed do you know and they actually don't react, you know, to things that you would ordinarily expect someone to react to. And I think these things can be worked on. And I think people, you know, who have those, you know, kind of issues would do very well to work with someone who specializes in trauma. So say you did CBT, I'm sure you did it with someone who you know really

had a good understanding around anxiety yeah and i think it's important that if you suspect you know that your your anxiety or whatever other issues that you may have are a consequence of trauma that it is important to work with someone who understands that that doesn't mean and i also think it's very, I think it's, you know, for me, you know, that's why therapy, when you said CBT, for me, the only therapy that is of value is therapy that empowers you to change your life in positive ways. I do not approve of, and I'm quite happy to say this, therapy that creates dependence, where you need your therapist in order to survive, where you have a lifelong relationship with your therapist. To me, that's

just making money out of you. It is not empowering you, you know, and I think a good therapist will, you know, acceptance and commitment therapy, you know, can be a very helpful form of therapy. You know, it's accepting, you know, the certain behaviors that you engage in, what you have to work on, and then committing to change them through very much what you're talking about, changing your thinking, changing your behaviors, and eventually your patterns in your brain will change. And what's really important to note while I say that is whilst you can replace old habits you know um you know whilst you can introduce new helpful healthy habits um the old habits will never go away okay they are always there it is important i have to work on this every day i always say that

i'm someone who used to have mental health issues but now i live my life as a mentally healthy person. But especially over the pandemic, old patterns have come back. Every single day I've got to work on it. Yeah, yeah. Those old patterns are there. Now, it makes sense from, you know,

just a brain performance perspective. Like, say you have to wear, say you wore lace-up shoes to work before the pandemic, right? When you learn how to tie a lace as a child, it's really difficult. It's a really cognitively demanding activity, okay? It's resource heavy. But then you learn how to do it without thinking, okay? It would not make sense after this year that you would have to relearn how to tie your shoelaces.

You might be a bit rusty, but the habit will just come back i'm scared of relearning small talk seriously i've met so few strangers i haven't look the only strangers i meet are in a shop and when i'm in a shop the anxiety is so high i can't hear them with the mask on so i'm literally i'm worried about small talk spontaneous small talk and as well I'm going to have to like it took a lot of work for me to become a person who can gig in front of a thousand people

and I'm going to have to go back out and gig in front of a thousand people but I think for the moment there's no point in worrying about it like worry serves

no purpose whatsoever deal with it because it's not happening right now so kind of deal with it you it's not happening right now. So kind of deal with it, you know. And when the anxiety steps in, I underestimate my ability to cope.

It's always the case because I know when it does happen, what I do say to myself is, fuck it, whatever happens, the best I can expect of myself is to cope. I will cope. Yes. Sorry, just hit my mic. There's two things there. so just to say to people in terms of giving useful kind of practical uh you know advice the thing is that old habits are more likely to return if you have poor sleep or you're going through a chronically stressful

period so being alert to that um is more important and a lot of us have experienced that you know and the funny thing is you know we change that in won't it change is often a big yes yeah change is quite challenging you know um but the thing is you know whilst we all dropped those habitual behaviors the routines that we had during the day most of us created new routines in the evening that weren't really very good for us, like saying it's five o'clock, I'm having a G&T, you know. And unfortunately, those habits, the brain is so desperate for patterns,

those, it's scanning. And your brain does not make value judgments about your patterns of behavior. It's just looking for patterns. You know why I think that happened? Now, this is just a little theory that I have. When lockdown happened, About your patterns of behaviour. It's just looking for pressure. Do you know why I think that happened? Now this is just a little theory. That I have. When. Lockdown happened.

The only. Behavioural context. That we had for lockdown. Was. The few days around Christmas. That's it. And what do you do at Christmas? I totally agree with you.

That's when you're allowed to drink. And you stay up late. And eat a full tin of roses. But then it's like. You're doing it for a month. Because it's like. Sure it's fucking Christmas. All the shops are closed i well there you go there you go great minds think alike that's my personal theory on this as well oh absolutely absolutely and i actually

said i do a good bit of radio and i actually said it on well it was sean o'rourke then you know that's what happened you know and i actually said so i was on in the early days of the pandemic giving advice and how people could cope with the stress because if you go back like we've kind of adapted a bit if you go back to those early days everyone was fucking Jesus okay and they were eating up every piece of news

and the toilet roll people going buying too much toilet roll but even speaking to people I would speak to someone and they had genuine true terror in their voice because there's a pandemic um i wanted to talk to you about curiosity because you did ask me about that about uh your creativity not your curiosity but create the creative flow so i think sometimes that's when i started into that sort of sort of hard bit to talk about the consciousness because

i don't like to talk about the moment um because i think it's unhelpful I think it's an unnecessary middleman it's too it's too iffy what you know what what is it you know I much prefer to just talk about the brain behavior and that includes thinking as a behavior um but our sense of self whatever that is that's kind of consciousness really is the is our sense of who we are. And it's just all the stories that we tell ourselves or the information that we've taken in from other people that, you know, build up to kind of who we are. That sense of self, we sort of give much more credit to that than it kind of deserves in a way. more credit to that than it kind of deserves in a way okay so when we want to solve a problem or when you want to write a song or do something really creative or whatever you work really really hard to do that okay now in a way particularly when it comes to creativity and insight, you would be better trusting your brain a little more.

So there's two things that you can do that will harness your brain's ability to be creative. One of them is sleep. OK, so I got as far as sort of the middle of the night where the memories are being sort of embedded across networks in your brain. So when you go through the night towards the you can say the later part of the night or I kind of think of it early morning, you know, when you're having that dream sleep, REM sleep, That new information that you have taken in is connected to your previous memories, your previous experiences and all the other information that you have built up in your brain over the years. And that's kind of why you can have those mad dreams where it's a bit of something from today with something from your childhood or whatever, all kind of mixed together. from your childhood or whatever, all kind of mixed together. OK, now, if you regularly get sufficient quantity of sleep, which for adults really is between seven to nine hours sleep a night and sufficient quality, good quality sleep.

So by that, I mean you go through those full five cycles. OK, you will then wake up with solutions. how many times have you kind of wrestled with the problem oh yeah you get a good night's sleep and you wake up with the answer when i have what happens is i wake up and it's as soon as i hit the shower that's when it pops into my head you get it okay i frequently get it as soon as i wake up so say when i'm writing my book you know i could be really struggling and i've learned now i know now i, I just stop, I stop. And I say it, I give talks to loads of corporate companies and, you know, you know, I gave one to architects, you know, and they're working to a deadline. And I say, stop, take a break, do something restorative, get a good night's sleep.

You've put the problem into your brain. Feeding the unconscious, I call that. Feed it. Yes, exactly. You feed the information into your brain and it will come out the next morning you might need more than one night's sleep you know how many times does the the idea come to you in the supermarket well pre-pandemic when you're not stressed because stress is going to interfere with so your brain has the capacity your brain is bloody brilliant trust it a bit more you don't have to always force it but put the ideas in another time when it happens is is when you're daydreaming okay so a lot of us are so busy all the time we're always doing um now and i'm not very good at sitting doing nothing i really am because that's where my slip into mental health

issues occur when you're not active you know i when i'm not active right i can start to ruminate um you know i mentioned you off air and i i've talked about in my own podcast as well my father had what was called manic depression back then or bipolar now or whatever so you when you grow up with someone like that and he was also suicidal throughout my whole teens, you're very aware of your own, you know, tendency towards depression or whatever, because you don't want to go that route. And so I tend to, you know, be very wary of when and how I might get depressed. So that is what would happen to me if I kind of and for, and, and for me, the most challenging time was when I was raising my children. So I would have to be there to monitor and make sure they're safe, but I couldn't actively be doing something. And, you know, I had a blue chair that I would sit in

and look out the garden and I would ruminate, you know, and I would get depressed because like, is this it? Is this what it's all about? Is there, you know, and I remember doing a podcast. I think it's my very first podcast with Hilary Fannin. And we were just talking about, you know, that and motherhood and, you know, those kind of things. And she laughed. She said she had a red chair, you know, and it was just that thing of, you know, I need to be active and doing. And when you're raising kids, that can be quite difficult. And also you can't have like I need stimulating and challenging conversations and

you don't have that with young kids. So that for me, but I'm kind of aware of that. But anyway, that was completely sidetracking. So daydreaming, what's really interesting is, again, when you look at the electrical activity in your brain when you're daydreaming and by daydreaming i mean not actively engaged in something not consciously actively engaged in something so actually in a way it could be when you're you know kind of strolling along you know the street or you know what i mean when you're not and maybe for you it's when that you're in the shower well what i try and do is i try and engage an activity that's that i would consider to be playful so if i want to create don't tell me what you're doing i mean if i'm if i'm sitting

down and i have to write a short story we'll say if i'm writing a book and this has to be what i'm trying to do is is i'm trying to daydream i'm trying to get into that daydream space where I'm not really controlling it but I am and that's where stories reveal themselves to me that's the flow yeah and how I get into that space is I know if I don't want to get into that space then I start to think what's a good idea I don't do that sometimes I'll actually sit down and think of the worst silliest idea possible

and write my way out of it and by and I think back to when I was a kid when I was a child and I used to play with Lego I didn't care about whether what I was making

was good I didn't care what it was I was simply engaged in the act of making Lego and then I would engage in that daydream state, which I now know as flow. So as an adult, that's what I do. I sit down at my laptop and I try and engage in play.

And I don't judge whether what I'm doing is good or bad. I'm simply having fun. And once I'm there, I've left the room. And that's what I'd like to know. How can I spend three hours writing a story, then finish it and literally feel as if I didn't write this? can I spend three hours writing a story then finish it and literally feel as if

I didn't write this like I'm watching someone else's film like what happened in that space because you haven't you

you have just let your brain flow right you've just let it produce without your dialogue

on top of it without your uh constant judgment of yourself there's no dialogue you are doing it so it's that dialogue you know that thinking that talking that self-talk is at the root of most mental um activity i'm going to ask you one last question before we go because it was a question that was asked on instagram right and i'd really like to know the answer epigenetic trauma or vestigial memory like can we inherit memories does the brain inherit memories like why am i scared of spiders i've i've never met a tarantula so definitely we have inherent fears and some people have hyper fears and so if you go to 23andme you know or one of those places and you get your genome sequenced or whatever they can tell you whether you are likely to have a fear of spiders

whether you are likely to to um you know like i can't stand um oh god what's that coriander uh i i just hate the taste of it um they can tell you things like that based on your genomic profile now I would have a huge did you say you have the fear of spiders I have a horrible fear of spiders I'm not too bad

like I'm not actually no I'm okay with spiders but like other people other people are scared of spiders and we live in Ireland we live in Ireland yeah there's a kind of a few

there's a few yeah yeah exactly there's a few theories on it but yeah no I look at a spider and my whole yeah i literally get the the hairs on the back of my neck stand up but you've never learned as an irish person that this spider is a threat no i never learned to fear to be fear of spiders however so there's always a combination it's always a combination of if you want to use that old thing nature and nurture but i actually think it's a combination of evolution so our brains have evolved and so so it makes sense right so uh ancestors of ours who had an instinctive fear you know who were more fearful of spiders maybe responded more quickly

and so therefore the ones who didn't died out because they got killed by the spiders you know what I mean or whatever so there's that bit there is your um there's sort of your genetic history you know from your particular family um and there's your lived experience you know and your learned experience and that shapes all of those and like people think that genes are are your genes but genes are switched on and switched off by experiences. So, you know, I could have the same genetic profile as a twin sister, but if we've had different experiences, the expression of certain genes will be different. I know in my book I wrote about, so there's things called, I can't remember the name of them, I nearly have to flick,

environmental factors, EDCs, I was was right and endocrine disrupting compounds okay and so basically they can impact on various bodily symptoms and hormones so when your brain communicates electrical and chemical signals it uses neurotransmitters okay they send messages but hormones so they are involved in sort of the immediate behaviors. But your hormones are also chemical messengers. But they influence their influences wider and for longer. So they they will influence sort of your overall mood rather than, you know, a particular physical action. Do you know? But you've hormones everywhere. You know, people tend to think of testosterone and estrogen as just being involved in reproduction but they're involved in learning

and memory and all sorts of things you've loads of those receptors in your hippocampus that i was talking about earlier but your endocrine system um releases your hormones but lots of these edcs are are found in things like soap and fire retardant chemicals. And they're around us in things that we consume. They're even in makeup, etc. Or in certain types of plastic and plastic bottles. OK, and they can disrupt your chemicals. OK, and they can impact and have changes on your chemicals.

Generally not in a very good way. OK, now, one of the really things that I was interested in when I was researching this myself for my book is that that influence can be passed on to a child. But it could also then be passed on to future generations, which is kind of crazy um which is mad and those edcs can actually interfere with your ability to manage stress um you know these are present in products that we can purchase oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so um uh let me see um yeah so they let me see if just see a list here because i'm tired you know they can be in the soil that grows the food or the water that you bathe in. You know, things that you drink and things that you eat. Antibacterial soap, some food stickers, some Teflon cooking, lots of stuff.

Right. But the thing is, actually, yeah, I mean, they can they can impact impact so here's what i actually have i have the page opened here around and this is i think the epigenetics that you're talking about so edcs are all around us an exposed mother can biologically transfer edcs to her baby through the placenta and breast milk there's also evidence that edcs can bring about changes in the cells that ultimately give rise to sperm and eggs. This means that the effects of EDCs can be passed through genes from parent to child and future generations could inherit the negative consequence of exposure experienced by their ancestors, sustaining impacts long after the original chemical is cleaned up that is mad that's kind of mad isn't it but that makes sense in a way about how it can happen and as i said i only learned about that as well because i i mean i have a whole chapter in my book on beating brain fog about hormones because hormone changes can impact on how your memory functions and various other things and so um

yeah i found that absolutely fascinating when i read the research on that about how it can it can kind of progress on to next generation so i'm a bit like you anyone listening trying to get my head around that whole epigenetics thing but it does make sense if something changes your hormones that can influence you know, the makeup of your sperm and your eggs. And they go on to make the next human being. Fucking hell. Yeah, it's mad stuff. I think we'll leave it at that, Sabina, because I'm conscious of your time.

But thank you so much for that chat. That was lovely. That was really informative. Thank you. I got an element of therapy for it as well because there was certain stuff that, I don't know, just the change. stuff that I don't know just the change

of like I'm seeing in myself certain negative mental health patterns coming back to me coming back again hearing someone say

that like sure of course there's massive change these are one of the things that will cause old patterns to re-emerge I'm like

fuck it yeah of course this is just part of the process of the pandemic so thank you there to my guest, Sabina Brennan. That was a really enjoyable chat. I'll catch you next week. I'll probably have a hot take. All right?

In the meantime, enjoy the weather. Rub a dog. Be compassionate to yourself. Have a bit of self-compassion. Can't go wrong with some self-compassion. Forgive yourself. Yart. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

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