The Wellness Scoop - How To Build A Healthy, Happy Brain

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Can we build a healthy brain? Are there psychological and lifestyle factors that impact on our brain’s functioning and therefore our wellbeing? We’re talking to Kimberley Wilson, a psychologist who’s passionate about education on the preventative measures we can take when it comes to brain health. We talk everything from why we ignore mental health symptoms to dementia, depression, anxiety, stress, diet and managing our emotional health.   Kimberley Wilson, How to Build a Healthy Brain: Reduce stress, anxiety and depression and future-proof your brain - https://www.kimberleywilson.co/about See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi everyone and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills. I'm very sorry to say that my co-host Matthew Mills is not here today. He's having customer meetings about new products that we're doing, which is very exciting, but he is sorry to miss episode one of season five. So we are back, we're back online, and we're going to be jumping straight back in talking about anything and everything related to our health and happiness. So for anyone that's new to the podcast, each week we pick a topic from the wellness space that we think matters and that can hopefully make a tangible difference in all of our lives.

And today's episode feels like the perfect place to start with that. We all know that our mental well-being is important. It's such a huge part of conversation today and something that really does matter to us all. And yet it's something that we seem to really be struggling with. One in 10 children in the UK right now have a diagnosable mental health condition. 47% of visits to a GP involve mental health concerns. The leading cause of disability around the world isn't diabetes or heart disease, it's depression. And 10 years from now, depression won't just be the leading cause of disability, it'll also be the leading cause of global disease burden, which is a measure of how much an illness affects quality of life, life expectancy, and the economy. As it stands, rates of depression and suicide

in young people have also risen faster in the last 15 years than at any point since records began. As our guest today, Kimberly Wilson says, something is profoundly wrong. Kimberly is a psychologist who began her career working in one of Europe's largest female prisons. She's passionate about brain health and most importantly focusing on the preventative side of this. So welcome Kimberly. Thank you so much. I love your book so I'm kind of like buzzing. I'm really happy to be back. I've got a fire in my belly. Your book made me like equal parts really excited and passionate and that kind of fire but also pretty angry actually and a bit upset okay angry why what you're angry about well I think there's just this sense and as you say there's there's so

much information you know the science is there but the science isn't being translated to the public and mental well-being and whether that's depression or it's anxiety or it's Alzheimer's or it's dementia you know this is a huge area it's something that affects us all whether that's depression or it's anxiety or it's Alzheimer's or it's dementia, you know, this is a huge area. It's something that affects us all, whether it's us personally or our close friends and family, colleagues. You know, it's a really huge thing. And it's something that feels like we're really lacking the tools and the information to be able to do things with it. And I think that that's what felt upsetting. Good, kind of. I think that's what I wanted to emphasise. What I really wanted to get across

with the book is the urgency of this all. But also the way that even though we talk about, you know, we've got a big mental health conversation going on, and everyone's talking about it. Yet, there's this wealth of information and research about the things that people can do every day, that can make an impact and improve their quality of information and research about the things that people can do every day that can make an impact and improve their quality of life and potentially protect their long-term brain health that just isn't being translated or put across to the public. And I kind of think it's a bit outrageous, right, that we have all of these public health campaigns around cancer, around diabetes. Of course, fantastic, we need those. But when our biggest killers and our biggest sources of disease and disability are issues related to brain health or mental health, where is the public

health campaign for that? And it makes me mad. And I kind of, I wanted to convey that sense of urgency and importance and value to the readers. And because that's actually my first question, and I hope you don't mind, but I've taken a little extract from the book that I really wanted to start with, because I feel like it almost feels like a silly question saying, can you have a healthy brain? Because it's not a question that people ask. And this is what you wrote, which I really liked and that kind of really, really resonated. I felt hit the nail on the head. As you said, one of the reasons for the disparity between how mental health conditions are treated in comparison to physical illness is the erroneous belief that they are solely a problem of psychology and not biology. It is so important to remember that the brain is an organ, just an incredibly complicated one with some very special functions. For example, we all know that for our heart to work properly we have to look after it by eating well, exercising, avoiding smoking etc. A heart that is not properly cared for will start to show impairments and functions like palpitations and changes in not properly cared for will start to show impairments and functions like palpitations and changes in blood pressure we get clues to show that it's struggling

and the same is true for the brain a brain that is struggling will begin to show impairments in its functions it just so happens that the brain's functions are mood personality planning decision making information processing and memory and then too many people brush these clues off they see them as incidental or worth something to be ashamed of and ignored and to me that sums up the whole thing we don't look at our brains like we look at our gut health which is obviously so topical at the moment our heart health the kind of general functioning of our cardiovascular system and all those sorts of things we just don't think about the brain like that no it's this really extraordinary dichotomy this real separation between the body and the brain and partly to be fair it's this really extraordinary dichotomy, this real separation between the body

and the brain. And partly, to be fair, it's the fault of psychology and psychiatry, because those professions, our professions, my profession, have looked at it like that. You know, so when something's gone wrong in your brain, we kind of look at you and say, okay, well, maybe it's something to do with what happened to you in the past, or maybe it's something to do with the stress you're experiencing now, or maybe it's just chemicals that have gone wrong in your brain, but only from the neck up. And we completely, or certainly historically up to this point, or up until very recently, have ignored the fact that your neurotransmitters require essential nutrients that you can only get from your diet. Your brain cells are actually made

up of essential fats that you can only get from your diet, that the chemicals that kind of slosh around in your bloodstream, some of them can cross over into the brain and cause reactions in the brain that can then trigger different responses in symptoms. And so, yeah, so the symptoms of your heart being unhappy, we understand as an issue of function. And so we should address the brain in the same way. We should go, hmm, this is a very complex organ, what are its functions? Okay, if those functions are going wrong, maybe it's a clue that there's something that this brain needs as a kind of first step, right? Because of course, I'm a psychologist, you know, trauma and life experience and adverse childhood events and experiences are hugely important. But also,

your brain has these fundamental needs for kind of basic care that are mostly neglected because people just don't know that what the information is, or how to access it. So the very reductive answer to can you have a healthy brain is yes, you can actively kind of go out in your life and do things just like you would to have a healthy heart. Yeah, I think that we can take a preventative, protective approach to the brain in the same way that we can with the body. And we absolutely should be because waiting until a crisis has occurred, waiting until something has gone wrong is so much more difficult when you're dealing with mental health concerns. Because by that point, the disorder illness the condition is much more entrenched it's already caused problems in that person's life people might be struggling financially in their relationships in their work you know it kind of cascades out in a way that physical things don't as much and we know that with mental health

concerns the earlier you intervene or the earlier you can start putting those resilience factors in the better so before we get into kind of what is in our power and what we can look to do i just wanted to touch on the why a bit a bit more about kind of as we said at the beginning like brain health is such a complicated thing obviously and there are so many different things that can arise from depression to alzheimer's and i was really struck by one study mentioned that 42 percent of adults in uk say that dementia is the disease that they fear the most that can arise from depression to Alzheimer's. And I was really struck by one study mentioned that 42% of adults in the UK say that dementia is the disease that they fear the most. Yet only 1% of them could name the seven risk factors

associated with that disease. So I just wanted to kind of get a little bit deeper into that because I think it is a disease we read a lot about in the press at the moment. It's a real challenge for the NHS. It's a huge challenge for all the families involved. and it's obviously something that people fear a lot and yet of course there's no like magic answer but again what we're saying is for these sorts of things there are possibly preventative things that can help some people yeah so 70 percent of people in

care homes in the uk have a diagnosis of dementia, right? So there's a huge social care burden, but actually most of the actual social care is being done by families. So dementia has this enormous burden of kind of financial, familial burden of needing for support and care, as well as, you know, the impact on the person's loss of life and the loss of their relationships and all of those things. Yet, as I say, there isn't this kind of public health campaign, this public awareness campaign for the brain or brain health. But a big Lancet commission that was published in 2017 showed that if people took the best case scenario preventative steps, and it's, you know, it's really best case scenario, kind of pristine lifestyles. But if people did that,

then we could prevent up to 30% of global Alzheimer's disease cases. So it's one in three cases that works out to about 15 million people. And that's a big deal, right? If I told you we could prevent a third of cancer cases, people would be kind of shouting it from the rooftops. They'd be saying, well, this is what you need to do. Get on top of it.

All these people will be ticking it off. Yet here's an international study by some of the best scientists in the world saying there are things we can do. No, there's no magic bullet. There's no promises. We're not saying you can 100 percent prevent it, but you can absolutely shift the odds in your favour if you can get these factors into your life as early as possible and kind of set up what I call a brain healthy lifestyle to kind of really protect your brain for the long term. What you mentioned that was interesting is that we've had effective drug treatments for depression since the late 1950s. And yet it's still such a huge and growing global issue. And at the moment,

we're treating it with antidepressants and or talking therapy, but it's just not proving to be as effective or as accessible as it really needs to be. And then as the number of people being diagnosed has grown, so has the number of prescriptions. And yet more than half of the people taking antidepressants, at least in in this country still say they have ongoing symptoms so it feels again like we're not kind of getting to where we want to be we're really not and so if we've had 50 60 70 years of of effective treatments then we would expect better response rates and what this has done what kind of looking at the pretty poor outcomes are certainly not as good as we would want them to be outcomes for people with depression and what's called treatment resistant depression, which is when you've tried two, three, four, five of the main medications and not got any response or still had residual symptoms. Then what it drives us to is to rethink our original hypothesis of what causes depression.

And I think one of the main things to say is depression, of course, isn't just one unitary disease. I think that's one of the issues people say, oh, depression, and think it's just one thing. But I think we need to understand that psychological disorders may look the same from the outside. People might have low mood, they might have social withdrawal, they might have poor sleep, they might have kind of changes in appetite. But the drivers or the causes of it might be different. One of the biggest problems that we have in tackling depression is that when you go to your GP, and mostly because GPs either aren't trained to properly assess for depression, or simply do not have the time, that their main concern is, are you depressed or not?

Right. It's a kind of very binary sick or not kind of response. What it means, though, is that people are given a kind of one size fits all treatment that isn't really focused on what might be causing that person's problem. And it might not be a chemical or neurological thing at all. It might simply be someone's massively overburdened with worries and what they need is a social worker or, you know, a therapist or just better social support. But if we don't understand the causes, we're never going to get the effective treatments that people need and deserve. And so the causes are a mixture of kind of psychological factors and environmental factors

then? Yeah, absolutely. So we know, for example, that there are lots of early life experiences, and even pre birth experiences that can contribute, right? So there are genetic risk factors that are associated with depression. And if you have a family history of depression, then you have higher odds of experiencing it yourself. But also interuterine nutrition. So what a mother eats or what a father eats preconception and how their physical health is can affect brain development and then exposure of hormones in the uterus during pregnancy, what the birth was like, early nutrition, all of these things. So there's a whole bunch of things that, you know, perhaps we don't have a full understanding of or control over. But then there's those early life experiences. So again, infant nutrition, temperament sometimes. So

all children are born with a different temperament, and some children are going to have a more natural internal resilience, and some are going to be a little bit more sensitive or a little bit more vulnerable. But then also those social experiences. So did you have a warm, loving home environment? Did you have your own sense of agency? Did you have good peer relationships growing up? Did you feel respected? Did you have the skills to understand your emotional worlds?

Did you feel safe? All of those things. And then those other social factors like, are you a member of a marginalised group? Or what's your socioeconomic status? Or did you experience a particular trauma in your life? How was that process? How was it managed? And there can be combinations of these things as well, right? So there's these these huge factors and that's why it's so so so essential I'm always banging on about the importance of assessment but really helping people to understand that there are a range of causes for these disorders they might need a range of

treatments and of course think about prevention and protection and helping people look after themselves before a crisis hits. So when it comes to prevention, what is it that sits in our power? I mean, there's a few kind of seems like sort of key things like stress, sleep, nutrition, exercise. Mm hmm. Yeah. So I guess much of it, I guess, could be boiled down to in some form to stress, whether that's a physiological stressor or psychological stressor, that there are profound ways in which stress affects the brain. So the area of the brain that I personally care about the most is the hippocampus. And it's this kind of central area for memory. It has some kind of modulatory functions as well, but mostly it's about memory and learning and memory consolidation. And the hippocampus though is also really full of

these receptors for stress hormones. Overwhelming stress or stress over a long period of time can overwhelm the hippocampus and start to cause damage to it. In fact, there was a paper published just this week showing that one week, so they took over 100 healthy young people, I think they were aged between kind of 18 and 22, healthy, normal weight, you know, no psychological concerns. And they put them on a Western diet for a week. And within that week,

they showed impairments in their hippocampal memory so there was kind of this early damage to the hippocampus so we know that a nutritionally poor diet can confer this kind of stress to the brain we know that the the chemicals that are released and produced by your body during exercise are protective can can help reduce stress, both physiological and psychological. So exercise is a really important one. Good nutrition is a really important one. Sleep is hugely important, right? And that's largely because when you're in deep sleep, your brain is able to clear out the kind of accumulated debris of the day, which is a physical stressor in the brain.

So your brain has the opportunity to clear all of that out. So those are some kind of key ones. And one of the ones that I really want people to understand is emotional management as well. Because again, I think people are very dismissive of emotions and they kind of think they just turn up and they're just a hassle. But if I were to sit down with someone and do a psychological assessment, if I was going to sit down with someone and say, okay, let's see whether you're psychologically well, what a psychologist or psychiatrist looks for is, are you responding emotionally appropriately in that moment? Are you laughing in the right

places? Are you expressing sadness in the right places? Is your emotional response appropriate to the questions that I'm asking? So actually, your emotions are our main kind of source of information with the thinking about psychological wellness, right? Depression is about consistent feelings of sadness, anxiety, consistent feelings of worry and nervousness. So actually, emotions are our core psychological concern, but people are really dismissive of them. They think they're less important than thinking or reason or decision making. So in the book, I've really dedicated a good amount of space to helping people understand what emotions are, that they have a function, and that they don't just turn up randomly. So what they are, how you can understand them,

and how you can manage them day to day, because we know that kind of chronic emotional stress is another form of stress for the brain, and that that is associated with poorer health outcomes kind of throughout your life. So can we get a bit deeper into that? So what, can you answer those three questions? Like why, why do they come up? What do they mean? Sure. So the ones that I featured in the book, I call kind of the big five.

And they are the ones that in my clinical practice, people seem to struggle with the most. So that's anger, envy and jealousy and shame and guilt. Yeah. So they're the kind of painful, sticky, awkward, difficult emotions. And I think one of the main things to understand about all of them is that they serve a very important survival function for us all. A survival and a social function. And there have been lots of kind of international studies that have looked at what

that function might be and why it's so important so um anger for example i mean lots of people say oh there's no point in being angry or hate being angry i feel like i'm out of control you know it's embarrassing and what i try to convey is actually anger is one of your, I call it your self-esteem emotion, because the capacity to be angry really says something about your ability to value yourself, because what anger is a signal of is injustice, right? If you think about the times when you get angry, it's usually when someone has treated you unfairly or you've witnessed something unfair. So maybe you've seen someone shouting at someone in the street or, I don't know, someone cuts in front of you in the queue. Like, even if it's a tiny kind of hint of anger like that,

it's still a kind of, huh, that's a bit out of order. That's a bit unfair. And the capacity to say that's unfair is the flip side of saying I deserve more or I deserve better. I don't deserve to be treated like that. And so what I find is that with people who are constantly suppressing their anger, denying their anger, pushing it away, saying, oh, no, no, I'm fine. I'm not angry. No, no, no, I'm fine. Actually, they end up kind of dismissing themselves quite a lot and underplaying the impact that a certain situation or relationship or a

person is having on them so anger is really i think an important emotion i think particularly for women to get to grips with women don't like to be angry we're kind of socialized out of anger but i think it's really important that a woman can feel kind of empowered and brave enough to know that her anger is legitimate when it's legitimate right um then envy and jealousy are also i think quite fun ones i think most people would disagree with me but i think again they're really important and we they're not again people think that they're quite petty but they're really important indicators of our social relationships. So people often confuse envy and jealousy.

They use them interchangeably, but actually technically, kind of psychologically, we'd think of them as overlapping but different. So envy tends to emerge between two people and jealousy tends to emerge between three or more people. So I might kind of envy your trainers or something like that. So envy is about my sense of not having or being a quality or trait that somebody else might have. Whereas jealousy is associated with feelings of exclusion. So if you and I are really good friends and then you meet someone new in the office and you guys go off for coffee I might feel jealous of the two of you going off and leaving me out of it because I would be feeling like oh I've been left out of that but in both cases what that tells me

is something about my sense of status and where I fit. And if people can manage that, if they can understand that, if I can say, oh, I'm feeling a bit envious of your trainers, what does that say about how I'm feeling about my own status, where I am, what I'm up to? Or, oh, I'm feeling a bit jealous that Ella's off with Sophie and they're having a lovely time. What does that mean about my relationship with her and how important that friendship is to me and whether I should feel like I should be investing in it a little bit more, then you can use that information to make different choices. Because I think the thing with these big emotions is if you can't tolerate them, if you don't know how to process them, you end up just pushing them back on the

other person. Whereas if I can understand it, if I can process it, then I can take responsibility for it and choose a better healthier more effective way of managing that emotion and then is there if I'm understanding this correctly as well if you let those emotions say just fester and you don't address them and you just kind of push them in that creates a psychological stress for the brain that ends up being actually more damaging to the brain in a more physical sense. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Because one of the things I also like to try to get across is that emotions just don't go away because you don't want to experience them. People can want to distract themselves from them, ignore them, hope that they go away. But the thing with emotions is

A, because they're such important evolutionary signals for us they will just either stick around kind of in the back of your mind and that will make me miserable it will interfere with my relationships it will be a distraction it will take energy and attention away from things that are more important for me or it gets displaced into some sort of other harmful usually behavior so one of the things I see quite often in alcoholism is an inability to tolerate anger or other big feelings. So people will drink to distract themselves, to shut down their thinking, to give them a different emotional state, right? So when you drink, if you feel euphoric, then that's taking you away from your anger. It hasn't dealt with

the cause of your anger, but it's momentarily taking you away from it. So if you can't deal with those emotions, either they're going to cause a psychological stress, or they're going to impair your behaviour or your relationships, or they can lead to these other harmful ways of coping. And the final thing that can happen if people can consistently suppress or ignore their emotions is that it can come out in what's called somatic forms, which is in physical pain. So that kind of chronic stress affects the body. And quite often things like back pain, migraine, headaches, inflammatory concerns can be triggered by the psychological stress of unprocessed or kind of undesirable emotions. Yeah, so actually understanding your emotions and processing them is so important.

It's so important. And it's one of the things that I think gets really overlooked. So even in the books out there that are about the brain and protecting brain health and mental health, they'll talk about things like nutrition. We've got books about sleep nutrition we've got books about sleep we've got books about how important fitness is for mental health but there's less and less about actually how your emotional world and the way that you deal with emotions affects the physical structure and function of your brain yeah and so because i think that's the thing that's interesting is when it comes to this sort of space there's often a kind of dismissal that overly feeling your feelings and it's a bit self-indulgent and

it's a bit kind of like woo woo and I feel like as a result sometimes I think we all suppress them for fear of people's kind of judgment or thinking yeah that we're overly emotional yeah especially because there is a stereotype around women as well for being over emotional and kind of difficult as a result which is a shame yeah not helpful at all so one of the things you talk about which i think is interesting as a following from this is building psychological resilience and it's an interesting one in terms of getting that that probably that balance right between acknowledging and processing and understanding your emotions but at the same time obviously as you say like one of the universal truths of life is that some pain is inevitable

like no one's going to go through their entire life without difficult things happening to them to the people around them like it's literally impossible to not have loss and challenge in your life and so how do you strike that balance between building that resilience and also kind of acknowledging and processing and why is the resilience so important? Yeah. And I think, again, resilience is a word that can kind of get picked up and slightly misuse sometimes. And I think we need to be always really careful that when we say things like resilience, we're not trying to, or we don't end up putting the blame on the person who is suffering and saying, oh, well, you're just not resilient enough. That's not massively helpful. Because there are lots of different

resilience factors so like i mentioned earlier on things like the family you were born into the financial circumstances you were born into the nutrition you experienced early in your life you know the country you were born in like all of those things will affect what you're exposed to and what your resilience will be so all of those things are out of your control. So we need to be really sensitive and thoughtful about the way that we use that term. But I think there are things that we can do, or there are skills and habits and traits that are associated with resilience, which is essentially the capacity to bounce back when something bad happens. And there are a few different things. So one of the big ones is self-compassion. And again, I work with a lot of kind of A-type personality professionals,

and they can have this belief that it's really important that they're hard on themselves because that's what drives them. That's what creates their ambition and their ability to hit their targets and hit their goals. But actually what we know about people who are hard on themselves is that when things do go wrong, they find it much, much, much harder to bounce back from that because instead of being able to say, oh, all right, that didn't work out. Let's see what else we can do. They're more wrapped up in self-criticism. Like you messed up. You failed.

Look how you should have been able to get that. Everybody else can do that. And so they end up being drawn into this spiral of self-condemnation, whereas someone who can demonstrate a bit of self-compassion is able to say, oh, well, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. I'm human. That's normal. You know, cut yourself some slack. Let's carry on and try something else. So self-compassion is one of the main kind of accessible, amenable ways of improving your resilience. And it basically comes down to the idea that we're all human, you know, we all suffer. And if you're human, then you will suffer and you need to cut yourself a bit of slack for that. And I think what's fascinating to me is just kind of of looking at this everything we've talked about so far is how all these things that you'd never think are linked are linked so you know as you said like what you know the psychological

kind of wellness that you're experiencing at any point in your life could have an impact on your brain which could you know then you're not eating well and the rest of it and it can all add up and add up and end up possibly impacting you in later life looking at diseases like dementia and alzheimer's and that i think is the kind of crazy link that that's probably what people are struggling with as far as i can understand it's like it's so the brain feels so elusive and then it's so it's so crazy you know i think people have a hard enough time understanding that like what they put into their body might impact their gut health for example you know that like a carrot may be more beneficial than a crisp you know not to say one you can't have both but like i think that that's feels like a stretch enough to think that what you're putting in on a fork

you know physically you're already putting that into your body and that feels hard to get your head around how that could impact some diseases and issues and kind of the workings of our of our physical body but then to wrap that up alongside our emotional health and think that that could genuinely impact our mental health in all capacity it's it's a it's a big thought well one of the biggest risk factors for dementia is loneliness, right? An emotional experience of isolation and separation. And partly that will relate to practical things like if something goes wrong and I don't have someone around me who I can turn to, then I'm going to struggle more, right? If I end up with a big bill that I suddenly have to pay and I can't at least talk to someone about it and have them comfort me, then I'm going to have to carry the burden of that stress myself, let alone whether they can help me out with paying for it or whatever.

But also it's just the stress of being by oneself. Like humans are social animals. We're born into networks. We're born into communities. And that over in evolutionary terms is how we're meant to be. So there's something a bit unnatural to be lonely and to be by yourself. And it causes a chronic state of stress. And that chronic stress is expressed in these kind of neurotoxic compounds that damage the brain. So we know that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of

dementia, as is depression. So if you've had depression earlier in your life, then that's associated with a higher risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And again, we think that might be associated with the biological response to stress in your mind that then creates these chemicals that can damage parts of the brain. So fundamentally stress in any capacity is what we're trying to avoid. And how one does that in modern life, I have no idea. No. And, you know, again, we have to be quite practical, I think, about it. But also about the clever use of stress. So in the book, I talk about the other. So there are three kinds of stress, you know, kind of everyday stress that most people know, whether it's sitting an exam or going for a job interview. Then there's chronic stress, which is when it's not just a one off thing, but you're under pressure all the time.

So let's say you have a boss who is kind of constantly on your case asking you questions and um that could be very stressful or if you don't get on with your work colleagues that could be a kind of chronic stressor but then there's a good form of stress there's a kind of eustress we call it eu from the greek for good um which is called hormesis and that's the kind of stress which again is kind of stress, which again is kind of manageable, but that the body and the brain responds to by getting stronger. So a very common example of this is exercise, right? So when you lift a weight, when you do a press up, you're exerting a little bit of stress on those muscles and your body responds by upregulating all of those compounds to help build more muscle tissue and you get stronger. And there are lots of ways in the body and the brain that these positive stressors can help

build physical resilience. So if we use that analogy again, right, that means that the next time you're faced with this physical stress, you're more able to deal with it. You're more resilient to the physical stress. And there are psychological practices that can help that as well so we know so self-compassion is one of those but also meditation is one of those and meditation has been shown to actually help build more brain cells your brain becomes thicker um which is a good thing um when you meditate regularly and better connected and thicker and heavier all of these things are good they're associated with better long-term brain health so it becomes another form of and it doesn't feel like a stressor but trying to focus your attention for more than a couple of minutes can be quite effortful in that sense so stress in that sense of so like a sudoku or a crossword or

something not really so we're talking in meditation yeah um what we know about brain training at the moment is that it tends to only make you good at those brain training things so doing sudoku or crosswords it doesn't tend to generalize into kind of better brain performance it just makes you better at sudoku and crosswords really so meditation so meditation makes your brain better effectively but those kind of brain training exercises they don't they just make you like a sudoku whiz yes what we interesting that's so interesting because so many people do that for their brain health but again they wouldn't think meditation's for their brain health no exactly but no the evidence at the moment says that those

brain training games just make you better at that very specific skill, and that the things that generalize are novelty. So learning new things, going to a new area, taking a new route home, learning how to dance, you know, learning a new language, meeting new people, all of your brain thrives on novelty. So just doing the same kinds of puzzles isn't really providing the novelty that your brain kind of craves and needs in order to get bigger and stronger and more resilient. And so to kind of start to sum up, is there a little like healthy brain checklist? Like, are there some key questions or things that we should all be asking ourselves or looking at or thinking about? Yeah, I think so. I think one of the problems

is that people get used to feeling not very great. Yeah. And it becomes just very normal to be a bit tired, a bit miserable, maybe a bit tearful all the time. And what people don't really recognize is you shouldn't be feeling like that. That shouldn't be considered normal, basically. Like don't consider feeling a bit rubbish as your everyday state of baseline. And so I guess a checklist would be about that consistency. Am I waking up feeling unrefreshed? Am I going through most of my day wondering when I can just get back into bed? Am I kind of counting down the minutes of my life? Like that's not a life well lived. You deserve

better than that. You deserve more than that. You deserve to feel excited and connected and enthusiastic. And when your brain and I suppose your life is fulfilled, then those are the things you'll be feeling. And so in the book, I do have this kind of checklist in the back where I can say, look, here are the things you can be doing that will help to support and improve those things. And you can track it probably best through mood. Right. So how am I feeling? Well, actually, the last two or three days haven't been great. But actually, a month ago, that was four days where I didn't feel great. So I'm getting a little bit of an improvement.

And again, of course, in the same way that, you know, people will go to their GP if their toe hurts, right? But they'll sit on depression or they'll sit on sadness for weeks and weeks or months, maybe years, right? So it's this weird thing where your toe is considered more important than your brain or your emotional well-being. So I guess the other thing to say is just take it seriously and if you've been feeling low or out of sorts for more than a couple of weeks because sometimes your brain does just funny stuff and sometimes you're just a bit low and sometimes it's hormonal or sometimes it's the weather you know yeah sometimes there's there are reasons that are really kind of easy to indicate as to why you feel that way yeah absolutely and it's probably worth saying that two of the big ones are hunger and tiredness right so hunger tends to make you feel a little

hangry yep absolutely and a little antsy a little bit kind of distracted a little bit you know unhappy um whereas poor sleep tends to make you a little bit more paranoid and up regulate those senses of persecution so if you haven't slept well, you're more likely to interpret someone's ambiguous statement or ambiguous facial expression as critical or hostile or mean. You're more likely to think so-and-so doesn't like me than when you're well slept. And that's really important, right, in therapy. So if I sit with someone and they've come back from the weekend and they said, I've had a really bad weekend and I don't know why, but I've just been feeling really low and like you've done something terribly wrong whereas if I'm checking first through the physiological stuff okay so tell me how your sleep was over the weekend then I might end up you know pursuing the

wrongs resolution whereas I might instead be saying okay well let's keep an eye on your sleep for the next week and then see how we feel and then we can track it that way the same thing can happen with alcohol um often people can wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats panicky stressed anxious and think oh maybe i've got an anxiety disorder maybe i'm having a panic attack but actually if you've been drinking that night that panicky response waking up in the night is actually a response to the withdrawal of alcohol from the from your system and so if you're not keeping track of those physiological things it can be very easy to mistake yeah what's a biological or physiological thing from a psychological thing so again that's one of the reasons why it's so important

to have a proper assessment and to be able to talk about all of these overlapping features of your brain health and the rest of your life. But it's a nice reminder, at least to me, again, of the fact that these things are so connected. Because I think, again, when we're struggling, we so often kind of go into the panic mode and we'll think about the big picture and, oh my gosh, is there something so wrong? Instead of thinking, do you know what? I need need to prioritize my sleep I need to be going to bed early I need to be getting eight hours maybe I shouldn't drink for a little bit maybe I should try and exercise in the morning before work maybe I should eat well and I know it's easier said than done like I totally get that I've definitely not been sleeping brilliantly with the tiny one but I find that really interesting because again I know you know for myself and I know for lots of

friends you know close to me that I see when people are struggling with with not necessarily very serious depression, but just kind of low mood and sort of ongoing levels of anxiety that we so often don't even look at those factors. Because also so often it's easier to run away from it. But sometimes, you know, sitting at home and going to bed early feels, you know, it feels easier to push it away in some capacity rather than embrace it and do those things but but what you're saying is that actually they can be really really powerful really powerful and people under well they either don't know or underestimate the impact of things like poor sleep poor nutrition a sedentary lifestyle on their brain health and therefore the functions of their brain mood decision making focus and attention and all those sorts of things.

Kimberly this is me I could keep you here for like hours and days the book How to Build a Healthy Brain is absolutely brilliant I told you I knew Matt couldn't make this podcast and I was saying and I was reading it the last bit in the bath and I was like cancel your meeting like you need to be here you need to hear everything. She is amazing. So if you were going to give our listeners kind of three key things to take away, if they were going to remember three things or tell someone else three things from this episode, what would they be? I would say take your emotions seriously. Understand that your brain is made of food. so your nutrition is really important to your brain health and don't ignore stress you try and tackle stress as soon as you can amazing thank you

so so much my absolute pleasure thank you for having me um we will be back again next tuesday and thank you guys so much for listening in. If you did enjoy it, please do rate it, review it, share it. It makes all the difference. And have a lovely, lovely day. Don't be stressed. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads.

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