The Resilient Mind - What Nobody Tells You About Personal Growth - Dr. Julie Smith

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

Dr. Julie Smith, a prominent clinical psychologist and bestselling author, has appeared multiple times on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast, sharing practical mental health advice on managing anxiety, stress, overthinking, and building resilience, with episodes focusing on detaching from negative emotions, handling rejection, and understanding the brain's threat response, offering accessible insights from her NHS backgroundTake action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to the truth about personal growth that no one wants to admit, with Dr. Julie Smith. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. In our history as humans of rejection and what that used to mean when I was a human, the idea of being like despat, like kicked out of my tribe. Yeah. And the threat that that would put me under if I was removed from my tribe and this idea of rejection. and really like a lot of rejection,

this is kind of what I came to the conclusion of, when someone says something like that, it's almost like for me it feels like a threat of rejection, a threat of being expelled from the, you know, from the tribe or whatever. Obviously not. Obviously that is not the truth. But deep within me somewhere, that desire to fit in and be accepted by the tribe is still there.

So having millions of people being able to give me feedback and some of them seemingly rejecting me from the tribe or saying that I don't feel, or whatever, is difficult. Is that like, that's a lot of words, but does that make any sense? Yeah, because the feeling comes before the rational thought about it. So, you know, your body has that reaction before you're able to consider that, you know, this isn't your only community or this isn't your family or people that are sort of you're dependent on and that kind of thing.

So I think the feeling will always be there. and it's always difficult, isn't it? But then you can override that with what comes next. So it's not about never having that feeling. And I hate it when people kind of say online, you know, just to stop caring what everybody thinks. And that is impossible because you're built to care what people think of you. And you probably wouldn't function in a society that well

if you didn't care what anybody thought of you. It's about how you then manage it. So when those thoughts come along about, you know, a negative comment, it's what do you do next with what comes up. So yeah, it's really about how you kind of respond to the thoughts that come up after. And is it, is it in those moments of rejection, is it really like the story we tell ourselves about what that rejection means to us? I'm thinking now more broadly about romantic rejection.

You know, I'm dating someone, she says, you're dumped. Like the harm surely isn't in the separation. Surely, for me, it's always felt like, well, I got to the point where I realized that it was more Steve's subconscious brain is telling himself he's a scumbag and not beautiful and not smart because of this rejection. Is that really where the harm is done, like that self-inflicted self-story? Yeah, so, I mean, rejection is difficult for everybody, isn't it? But certainly if rejection taps into what we call a kind of core belief,

so if someone grew up with a core belief around being unlovable, for example, because maybe their parents were inconsistent in their care, for example. So they, you know, and you don't think about these beliefs consciously all the time. You know, they're not at the forefront of your thought processes, but they will influence how you feel and they'll influence how you behave and the choices that you make. So what happens is when we have a core belief that is sort of damaging one or detrimental one, we develop sort of rules for living around that that help us to keep it at bay. So it might be, you know, if I can just be the perfect business owner

and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect dad, then no one will reject me and everything will be okay. And so you set yourself these rules for living that at some point, inevitably, you break or there's signs that you're not going to be able to keep up with them. And what that does is when there's signs that you're not going to keep up with those rules for living, you then, it kind of triggers that core belief to come to the forefront.

And that's when you get that rush of kind of psychological distress because it's a distressing thing to believe about yourself. And so that's when it can cause people real problems when that sort of damaging core belief is being triggered on a regular basis, for example, maybe because it's a turbulent relationship or whatever the situation is. And that's when you can work not only on the present stuff, but on the core beliefs and looking at how those are playing out in relationships. There's a really fascinating therapy called cat therapy, actually.

So it's cognitive analytic therapy, just CAT for short. but that really is just a fascinating therapy where it looks at the relationships that you have when you're younger so when you're growing up with with parents or siblings or family and in those relationships you learn how to behave in the world right you learn about you know who I am what to expect from other people and what to expect from the world at large and then you develop kind of survival strategies or coping strategies in for example in a difficult relationship like that, you learn how to cope with that and you have these kind of safety behaviors. And as you grow up, you're in a different situation, right? You're not dependent on parents and stuff like that. But those

survival strategies, all those safety behaviors continue and they get played out in your adult relationships. And I just love that therapy. It's great for looking at the patterns and the cycles that people tend to feel stuck in in their relationships and how that reflects those, early life experiences that are essentially outdated coping strategies. But it's really difficult. You know, if something's been a lifetime of habit, you can't just break that by telling yourself to do that. So it takes time and it takes practice. And you literally kind of map out the cycle so that you learn to sort of acknowledge it in hindsight, first of all. So you say, okay, last week, that happened and that happened. And yeah, I went around the cycle. And then

eventually you've done that enough that you start to recognize it when you're in it. So as you're about to do something, you think, hang on a minute, I know what this, this is predictable, I know what I'm doing. And in that moment, you then get this chance, this is a beauty of kind of awareness, is you then get this chance to choose whether you go with it, and sometimes you will, and you'll go around the cycle again, and sometimes you'll do this other thing that you've already worked out you need to do, and you break the cycle, and then you get the benefits of that. And so it's this really kind of long process of sometimes go around the cycle again, and then sometimes breaking it and finding this new life that you can create in your relationships and stuff

like that. So, and it's incredible how life changing that can be for people. If someone can't afford to go to cat therapy or whatever, is there, is there a way at home or within their own life that they can sort of achieve the same outcome? I think, I don't think it's a replacement for it, but I think definitely, um, things like journaling and, and reflecting on experience. experiences and trying to look at patterns of behaviour. So, you know, I always find that, I don't know, when I'm with my boyfriend, we argue about this after I do this. And then you can literally sort of work it out on paper, just writing things down. What happened? Then what happened next? Then what happened next? How did I feel? How do I think they felt? How did then I feel when they said that?

And you're really kind of just going through it. But keep doing that, you know, just doing it once won't necessarily open up everything. But when you keep doing it, you can work out patterns. the themes and and then when you start to get, you know, a sort of knowledge of that cycle, you can then, you know, begin to look at what's different. But sometimes it's really difficult to just know how to break the cycle. Sometimes that's a really difficult part of therapy for people is working out, well, where can you break that cycle? Where can you exit and do something different? And what is that different thing? Because if you knew, right, you would just do it. So it's not easy. And I think, you know, maybe it's, maybe that's another book to write, isn't it? It's

talking about that relationship stuff because it's so important to people. And, you know, sometimes having good friendships and people that you trust to talk through these things with can help to give you that other perspective, you know, kind of fact-checking some of your own, because when you're in it, it's so hard to see the wood for the trees, isn't it? You're kind of, it's so much easier once you've got stuff down on paper and you're kind of looking at it, you've got that bird's eye view, and that's really the process of therapy. So if you can recreate any aspects of that with a really trusted friend, or loved one, then that could be helpful.

I don't think it's a replacement for therapy and the model and the training, but it's certainly something. When you grow a big platform very quickly, there's a lot of other sort of, I guess, psychological things to contend with. One of them is imposter syndrome. Yeah. One of them is the claim, which will be leveled at you, I'm sure, that you got lucky. How do you deal and contend with all of these thoughts?

I'd say lucky's pretty hard work, isn't it? You probably know that. Yeah. And, you know, there's an element of that. I think, you know, there's probably a timing thing for me in that, you know, this huge pandemic started and lots of people at home tapping into new social media platforms they hadn't before. I think it's been uncomfortable all the way along.

I think because it's been new and I've been, it's very public and that's way out of my comfort zone. You know, I hadn't, I'd been in such a kind of small, but I live in a small town. I had a small, you know, one-man-bound private practice. It was just me. And the whole reason for that was so that I could balance it around my children and be the mum I want to be. It was all very kind of organic.

And suddenly this thing started to happen and become a bit of a roller coaster. How does it feel to know that the more successful you become at what you do, the more public you're going to become to the point where you might be in the daily mail every week? And do you know what? I've had quite a few moments. I'm not even really told you on this, but I've had quite a few moments along the way

and where I've really, really questioned, do I even want this? And I kind of told myself that as soon as all that feedback, nice feedback from genuine people who were saying, thank you so much, you know, what's next. I was just kind of waiting for that to stop so that I could stop because it's really not been easy. You know, I've got three small children. And it's really, really important to me to be present for them. so I wanted to keep it as balanced as I could, which has been nearly impossible.

So I was getting up at like five in the morning to make videos for TikTok in the dark before my kids got up and stuff like that. And it's not been, you know, it's not been an easy ride. And so it's kind of, you know, it's been hard work. And I think I kept going because I felt like it was temporary. I felt like at some point everyone's just going to think, yeah, this is boring now. And we'll stop. and we would have helped a few people and that'll be great.

I mean, maybe you could advise me on that because you live that, right? I'm literally going through the same thing, which is this realization that I've had more recently, especially with the success of the podcast than joining Dragon's Den. Yeah, and I think that's where it almost goes against the grain again, doesn't it? Because we're kind of taught to believe somehow. There's this undercurrent in our culture that you should strive for, you know, riches and fame and those things because they'll somehow, how make everything good.

And actually they make things harder as well. So, you know, while some people can really enjoy that and they'll really feel that that's where they want to be, there isn't this narrative where people say, it's okay not to because those people are being quiet and going off, you know, and doing their own thing. So we don't hear that narrative of it's okay not to be extraordinary or it's okay not to stand out from the crowd

or it's okay to want a quiet life or a private life. And, you know, I'm as much a victim of that as anyone else because, you know, when I'm not wanting certain sort of public things, I question myself, you know, what am I doing? Am I, is this right? And it's often, you know, about your own values, isn't it? And how you want to live. And I guess all the time that you're questioning that

and reflecting on it and making choices, none of them have to be permanent. There's this idea that, well, if I don't take that opportunity, it's all over. Probably not. So you know, you can kind of play around with it, can't you? You could probably have, you know, six months off to go and hide away somewhere on an island. And you could come back and experience public life again so that you could almost, you know, work out what is it that I like and want about each one and how can I create a balance for me. But yeah, we're just taught that we need to just strive for extraordinary and out of the crowd.

And I think we have to question that. Where are you at the moment on this topic in terms of deciding, you know, how much of, you know, how much attention in this audience you're building you want to build versus the privacy and the family and the things that are so clearly much more intrinsically aligned with your values? I think I'm getting there to a sense, in the sense that I need to stick to the reason that I started in the first place. I think I have to keep that sense of integrity about, you know, I started to be helpful. And the thing I loved doing, you know, the thing I loved about writing the book was researching and learning about psychology and keeping up to take it with the research. And that kind of stuff is the stuff I love to do. I love to learn about people and then to share that knowledge.

And so I guess as long as I'm doing that and trying to sort of protect my children at the same time and live a normal life, then that would be okay. but all of these things are a balance. I don't think there is a clear set answer to any of these things, are there? You know, like you've had that experience with the paper, and that's made you kind of maybe step back a minute and think, wow, how much do I want this kind of thing? And it doesn't have to, you know, make you do a 180,

but it can make you just acknowledge and learn. I don't want to go too far in that direction. This is what I want. And I feel like it's that with me. You're constantly just edging from one sort of position to another. And you've got to learn from the experience like on the job, right? Yeah.

Because these are not lessons that I could have learned from someone just telling me. One of the things you spoke about there is about values. So values and goals, what is the difference? What is the value? Sure. So the way I would talk about sort of values and goals and therapy is really around a goal is something that you,

once you achieve it, once you get there, it's done. So, you know, your goal might be to get through your exam. Okay, exams are over, you passed, done. A value doesn't finish or end. It's a pathway. If you imagine your life as a journey, for example, it's a path that extends the whole of your life and it's something that you choose to always stay close to when you can. And I think, you know, life will always take you in different directions. So sometimes life will pull you away from a particular value. But it's really about always evaluating and knowing where that path is so that you can pull back in that direction. So for example, when your, you know, your career starts to take over because

it's so busy and then you think, oh, I haven't spoken to my girlfriend all week, that's you going, that path's too far away now. I'm pulling back. I need to head back in this direction because this is important to me. And so it's a kind of, you know, winding path where you're, you're, sometimes you're pulling away from it and sometimes you're going back towards it. And something that I included in the book was these sort of little values check-ins that I would do and we do in therapy where we look at, okay, just look at the different areas of your life. It doesn't have to rocket science, doesn't have to be really kind of airy-fairy. It's looking at, okay, what's important to your life? You might have family, intimate relationships, health, creativity, you know, lifelong

learning, career, contribution, those kind of things. And then you could literally kind of split it up into boxes and put in each box words not about, what's really crucial is it's not what happens to you. It's not what you want to happen to you. It's how you want to respond to things, how you want to be in that area of your life, what kind of person you want to be. So let's say you were looking at your, you know, romantic relationships. What kind of boyfriend do I actually want to be? You know, what kind of partner do I want to be? What do I want to represent to that person? And how do I want to come at difficulties? How do I want to sort of respond to problems that we face and, you know, that kind of thing? So it's all looking at the attitude that you bring. And, you know,

to that situation in your life or that area of your life. And you might come up with words that then kind of resonate or, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe in your work life, maybe enthusiasm is a word that you just hold close to you and that becomes one of your values. And so you can then, and sort of exercise that's in the book is you can almost rate, okay, how important is it to me to be enthusiastic in my work? Maybe it's 10 out of 10. That's really, really important to me.

and on that same scale then how much do I feel like I'm living in line with that this week or today two out of ten I'm pretty tired can't even bother today this job's really boring today or whatever and so what you've done there is you've opened up a discrepancy between okay this is really important to you but you're not living in line with it why what's going on not not in a way that you can then be really self-critical that has a tool to say yeah my girlfriend's really important to me but I haven't seen her for four weeks. Why? What's stopping me from jumping on a plane right now? Okay, let's do that. And then, you know, when you start to do those things and you're coming back towards your value, the sort of rating for how much you're living in line with it would go up.

And so doing that kind of exercise is really just a long, long-winded way of saying you can look at what's important to you. You can just do a really quick measure up of how much am I living in line with it and what errors of my life do I need to pay attention to because I'm not living in line with it. So it can be kind of quite simple and a fairly quick exercise, really. You know, maybe you had that aspiration when you were younger and you went with it because it's all you knew at the time. And then you learned some. You became more wise and your values shifted slightly. And and that's the thing. That's why I talk about doing sort of quite regular values check-ins because depending on your life, you know, stage and what you're doing, your circumstances, your values will

change. You know, my values transformed when I had children and, you know, probably sort of flip them upside down really. And that's okay. I could never have known that that would be, I couldn't have prioritized my children before they were there anyway, you know? And for example, you might not have been able to know that you would feel differently now back then at that age. You didn't have the capacity to do that. You hadn't had the life experience. So it was okay. You know, there isn't this sense of there is this right path. And if you'd get on it at 17, you'll be all right. You know, the whole process is a learning process.

So it's okay to change direction. It's okay to discover, this is not where I want to be, but I've learned something. Here we go. Let's change a direction. Let's go in this direction. And now I've got the knowledge of where I don't want to be. Speaking of changing direction, then, a lot of what's written about how we change direction is you've got to make this, like, big, grand decision in your life.

And then today you've got to go in that direction as if it was like a 90-degree turn. And this can be quite terrifying for a lot of people because it's not easy to do. You talk about this in the book, you talk about habits and things like that and how we make change in our life. What have you learned in your experience as the clinical psychologist

about how people do actually make meaningful change in direction in their life? I think something I've learned is that big meaningful change is not made drastically and quickly. You know, sustainable change is made carefully and there's this process of it's not just action. There is a lot of kind of reflection

and then there's a bit of action. Then there's a bit more reflection of like, we tried that, how was it? You know, do we need to change direction? You know, we keep moving. So it's a kind of bit by bit by bit, but we greatly underestimate how powerful and sustainable that can be when we do it bit by bit and, you know, develop habits,

for example, and constantly reevaluate and check in on which direction we want to go in. So I think something that I've learned, and certainly actually in my NHS work, for example, the type of work that I was doing, it took time. You know, if someone's really poorly and there's a lot to work through, that takes a long time, and that's okay. That's kind of how we work. It takes time to heal and things like that. So I think I learned to sort of acknowledge that not everything has to be done yesterday. You also talk a lot about in your book about how we can turn bad days into not so bad days, I guess. And this relationship, which I find really fascinating between the decisions we make, our mood and our, are like actions and behavior and how they're all like fundamentally linked.

And I was thinking, I remember when I was writing my book having a particular moment where I was in like a bad, I was in like not a good mood. And I was trying to understand how to kind of hijack that to get back to a good mood. Do I go for a run? Do I just focus on my actions? Do I have to think my way out of my bad mood? What would you say to all of that? I think thinking your way of a bad mood is difficult and often takes quite a bit of practice around using specific skills and stuff like that.

Sometimes the quickest way to impact on your mind is through your body. So things like exercise, music. using your voice, like singing and stuff like that, things like that, can create quite big shifts in the moment, but also human connection. So, for example, you know, if you've been, you know, kind of pent up and tense, or you felt unsafe, and then someone hugs you and you burst into tears, and it's that kind of shift of emotion. And so, you know, things like human connection, movement, music,

you can utilize those to good effect. You know, if they, different people are different. So, you know, one thing will work for one person and something different will work for someone else. You know, I don't know. My husband likes to listen to kind of really like old school New York hip hop and stuff. And that puts them in a great mood. It puts me in a terrible mood. I hate it.

So it's kind of, you know, everyone has a different experience of things like music or exercise. But if you can understand your own experience, what works for you, then definitely you then utilize those to create even small shifts in. the moment because a small shift can just change direction and then other things can help to kind of move it forward what about sleep how important is sleeping in terms of our mood and mindset oh so important so important and you know that's kind of a battle i've been going on because because you know with this kind of work and the demands of of you know creating content um alongside having three small children it's it hasn't been unusual for me to kind of be up in the night with

with children and then be getting up at five to make videos before I take them to school. And like, you know, just it's not sustainable, that kind of lifestyle. And but I notice if I have not had enough sleep for, you know, a few days, it will impact on how I feel and it'll impact on my performance and how effective I'm at work and what I'm doing. And so, you know, you have, it's something you just have to take seriously. I think and something that I don't know in our culture there's this kind of shift towards

what's the saying like you sleep when you die and all that rubbish you know that kind of well you will die sooner if you don't sleep so you know that's that's weigh this up so it's one of those things it feels like when there's more to be done than can be done it's so tempting all the time to to ditch on that bit of extra sleep that you know would be good for you but it's yeah I think it's something that we all have to just always remind ourselves.

You've got to come back to it and you've got to give your body what it needs. Do you feel like you've got that balance now? I think it's always, I think it's always a tightrope, isn't it? You know, like something will happen and there'll be a late night or an early morning and that shifts again and there's no recovery because, you know, children are waking up early and stuff. I think while I've got a balance, I hate the idea that I might perpetuate this notion that I've got it right and that, you know, just do what I do because I've got this perfect life

and it's absolutely not that way. That's something that I think is detrimental, you know, in kind of social media and things like that that can really catch people out is the idea that you look at someone online and you assume that they have it all sorted and that they don't have problems and that they don't struggle with normal human stuff

that we'll struggle with. And so I've tried to sort of keep that honesty all the way along but yeah, these, you know, I mean, these are great. great tools and they really, really help, but it doesn't stop life throwing stuff at you. It doesn't make you invincible. And I say that in the introduction. This isn't the key to a problem free life. It's an arsenal of tools that you can use to face those problems with that will ensure you can kind of get through it. Talking about all of that, so, you know, the success you've

had and the impact has had on, you know, your life and having to wake up sometimes at God knows what time to film a TikTok video. One of the things I read about in psychology is this idea that our motivation can start to diminish when something becomes extrinsically motivated. So when you're paid to do something, your motivation to do the task weirdly diminishes, even if you enjoyed it before being paid to do so. So have you felt that in your life that now that TikTok and making videos has become work, the motivation to do it is shifting at all? It can do.

I think there's the temptation for it to do that, isn't there, when things shift. and that's why I think it's been so important to me to keep it in mind. I think if I didn't have that initial reason for, you know, I wanted to share this really good information that's usually locked away in the therapy room. It just wasn't me. So it wasn't enough of a pull. You know, I didn't have any interest in being kind of public person, that kind of thing. So it wouldn't have been enough for me to work that hard on it.

And it's, yeah, as long as I keep that. that thought or that value in my mind about, you know, sharing knowledge that can help people with their mental health, then that enables me to keep going. But has it shifted? What, in terms of becoming less motivated? Yeah. Or feeling more and more like work? No, I think there was a period where it felt like just a grind of work when not the

writing. I loved the writing, but then there was obviously this pressure to keep, you know, putting content out there and I can't just disappear for six months. And that pressure felt like, but I think that was a symptom of overload of just, okay, I've got to write a book. I've got to be a mum and it's lockdown and we're homeschooling and I've got to get video on every day. And, you know, for me, that's a sign of overload and that in turn influences your motivation in the moment. But I guess I'm aware that motivation, something I can't rely on anyway. It's a feeling and it comes and goes. So some days it will feel like a grind and other days it will feel really exciting, you know, coming to do this and meet you and that, you know, that stuff's kind of really

wonderful. And some days, you know, I'm in my therapy room on my own with a camera going, oh, got to say something profound now, you know, what I find something. So, you know, and I think it's an awareness of every job has its ups and downs. I can't. rely on feeling like it all the time. I have to remember why I started it and the values behind it to keep me going. What have you, so that term overload was interesting because I've never really heard of someone describing it like that. Typically people say things like burnout or whatever else. What is the, what is I guess the cause and or the cure for people that are feeling overload? Because I guarantee you like 95% plus are people listening to this now, especially in the

world we live in, will be feeling some sense of relative subjective overload in their lives, including me. Yeah, and I think we're subjected to these kind of ideals of everything, aren't we? And, you know, for parents, there's this kind of, all of these images about what it means to be the ideal parent, depending on what kind of content you're consuming. And then there's these ideas of the ideal business person or the ideal author or the ideal social media, you know, whatever. And because we're subjected to so many of them, we're then just overextended. We're trying to do everything perfectly and it's impossible. And then we feel terrible and we feel like we're failing or we're at fault rather than the culture that says you can be anything you want to be.

You know, actually it's okay to decide this is what I want my life to look like and that's okay. you know it's just it's okay for it to be like that and and for people to have goals that are smaller than others you know it's um i think it's it probably leads to a much more psychologically healthy outcome i kind of bring that that back to a point that i mentioned earlier and i'm probably just asking this for my own interest but you're theoretically you're you're heading in the direction of maybe having 20 30 14 million followers yeah i don't know No. And then the demands on your time are going to be, people are going to be offering you, you're on TV show and they're going to be asking you to write seven books on a seven book

deal and everyone's going to want you on loose women and ITVs, good morning, you know, all of these, it's going to be constant. So how do you, how are you going to navigate all of that? In all honesty, my barometer is always my family, so my children, and I will only ever, do as much as I can do while I'm being the mum I want to be, I think. And I won't always get that right. And I haven't. Along the way, there have been times when I thought, no, this is too much. I need to pull back and things like that.

So I think, yeah, that's my kind of centre point, really, because that is, you know, where my core values lie. And that's the most important role I have as far as I'm concerned. And so I guess I will always use that as the baseline. you know, is this going to have a detrimental effect on my family or not? And what can I do within that? Yeah. And that's kind of a values filter, I guess.

Yeah. In many respects. These feelings we have, these emotions we have, I've always contended with, and I think society has a role to play in telling us how to manage the emotions we feel when we go through life. You know, on one hand, you have this sentiment where it's like kind of just shrug it off, ignore it, keep going, which doesn't seem to be possible with like deep,

emotions actually seems to be that you're just compartmentalizing it in the back room and it's going to erode your brain from subconsciously. And the other one is that, you know, the other narrative we hear is to when you feel strong emotions, to really like embrace them and to like, but that feels like it can be a bit too consuming that I might not get out of bed in the morning if I really sit and wallow in my emotions. So what is the balance of embracing emotions or kind of shrugging them off and ignoring them? Yeah. And actually it's quite sort of complex work when, when you look at sort of what happens in the therapy room, you know, there are people who, when they experience emotion,

it's quite unsafe for them because the coping strategies that they've had throughout life have been unsafe or dangerous ones. And so, you know, we'll never kind of advise people to just, you know, open the floodgates and allow everything in. It's very sort of careful and there's a process of gearing people up with the tools. And I often talk to people about this when they're thinking about going, to something like a trauma therapy, right? So while that involves going over the trauma,

no decent therapist would ever get you to do that without first gearing you up with the tools to be able to cope with the emotion that comes up. So for anyone who feels like they, for example, kind of shut down emotionally and sort of block it out, you want to open up gradually to things and open up gradually to emotions that feel maybe less dangerous or less sort of overwhelming

in small ways, in supported ways as well, so that you know you can manage it and it's not going to completely be overbearing. But I guess on a kind of day-to-day level, lots of people don't even recognise that they're blocking. They just recognise that whenever they've done something at work that's embarrassing and they feel awful, they just go home and crack open the fridge

and they're just looking for anything. Or maybe it's go on Netflix for like six hours and block out the world or gaming or whatever it is. And so often it's hidden in the behavior. People were saying, yeah, I'm fine with emotion. But I smoke 50 a day. And, you know, it's a kind of, you know, what's the function of this and that and the other? And it's always about looking at it with curiosity, not judgment, but curiosity. Why am I doing that?

What's the function of that? What's it doing for me? and often it will be some level of safety around something that's uncomfortable but it's really key that there's no judgment there because it's something that we all do it's human and that's because our brains are so brilliant at taking over for us

and doing something very quickly that we need to make things better. To make us comfortable, to feel comfortable in some way even if it's some destructive medication or something. On that, you know, on that point of we have a behavioural response to some stress or emotion we're feeling

and maybe not confronting. I think I did that a lot. When people used to ask me how I dealt with running this big global business, 700 employees around the world, when times got really tough. I mean, on the worst days

where there was no money in the bank and payday was today, those kind of days. I used to, I think I used to say on interviews and stuff that I used to come up with all this nonsense about how I dealt with it and how I coped with it. But in hindsight, one of the things I came to learn

was the only times I ever got sick or my skin ever got bad or like two days after those really high stress moments. So on the surface, I was kind of shrugging off and playing it cool. But my body, as the famous book goes, held the score. My body would tell me. Even if my conscious mind wouldn't admit it, my body would tell me. And then even more recently, I've noticed that in certain situations where I'm pretending everything is fine,

I'll notice maybe my eating habits or my other habits get a little bit more extreme and out of control. And I always thought I was invincible. I always thought I was some tough guy. And I think people followed me, well, I hope not. But I think they saw me as that as being this kind of like, you know,

mentally perfect, you know, resilient character. But even I've noticed that in my behaviour. And it's been so interesting to just pay attention to it. It's sometimes difficult, because especially if you do engage in these kind of coping mechanisms shall we say a lot. You might find them harder to notice, but for me, I don't.

So when I see any shift in my behavior, like, I remember going through a pattern where I was just eating crap again. And I thought, why am I doing? Oh, shit, yeah, because of that thing you've not addressed. That's playing on your mind every time you wake up. And then my skin tells me straight away, I get some, like, breakout on my skin.

Men are the worst at this. I mean, so they say. They're the worst at talking about how they feel because of the stigmas and stuff. Yeah, certainly. I mean, about 70, 5% of my followers are female. But saying that, of the, of the male followers that I have,

they're among some of the most engaged and ask questions and, you know, come up with new topics and respond to really positively in comments and things. And so I think there is a shift in the right direction. And I think, I think social media has had a lot to do with that, actually. It's enabled people to start having a conversation that they wouldn't dream of having face-to-face with people. And certainly I recognize that when I was just working in my private practice, I wanted to do it around the family. So I couldn't do it all. So I kind of left the NHS and I thought I'll just work in like school hours and I'll manage it around that kind of thing.

So I thought I would have to advertise. And I never did. And that's because, well, therapy is a really private thing when you're really struggling. When it works and you get better and then you're doing fine and it finishes and you go off and back, your life and then you come across someone who's struggling and they go that really helped me try that and so actually all of my work was based on word of mouth and and I think that's happening more and more that people once they struggle work out a way to get through it then believe in the in the tools that they learned whatever they were they're willing to share that and and because they

don't want to see other people go through the same thing and I think that's a bit of the shift of that stigma that people are going, oh, yeah, I went through that or something similar. Go and try that. It really helps. And if people are sad at home and there's something that they know they haven't addressed that's playing on their mind, that they're thinking about a lot often and trying to just kind of compartmentalize and not, what would you say to those people? Like, because, you know, they might be seeing the behavioral symptoms of not addressing that thing. What would you, how do we get it out of the back room and, prevent it from causing us behavioral self-harm?

Well, I guess, you know, some people will go to therapy because they'll have access to that. Others won't even consider it or have access to it for whatever reason. And I think whatever the situation, human contact and human connection is everything. If you can find someone that you trust to talk to, and even, let's say, worst-case scenario, you don't have anyone you can trust to talk to

or you feel so awful about this particular situation that you can't bear to talk to anyone, write it down. Just use words, use art, whatever it is, try and get to grips with what could possibly be going on here, start reflecting on experiences, not with judgment, but just looking at what's happening, what happens here, what happens before that, what leads up to it?

That's a lot of what happens in therapy, actually, is, you know, people will come in with a feeling, oh, felt this awful thing. and then we'll look at, okay, what led up to that? Let's go back a week and let's work to it. And, you know, what made you vulnerable to that? And then equally, what came after? What did you do? Did it make things worse? Did it help? A lot of those things that we end up doing habitually are the things that work instantly. And they're addictive because they work instantly, right? It's going to the fridge or grabbing the wine or whatever it is that they're addictive because they give us instant

relief, but in the long term they keep us stuck. So they're the things that then get us in that cycle of the next time you have that feeling, you feel even more need for that safety behavior or that blocking behavior because it worked so quickly last time. And actually the things that tend to work in the long term are hardest in the moment, like sitting with it and feeling it and using skills to get yourself through it. So it's not an easy ride. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.