The Wellness Scoop - How to Improve Your Mental Health Everyday

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

We’re joined by Dr. Julie Smith, a Clinical Psychologist, to talk about the simple, practical tools we can all use to improve our mental wellbeing.    We discuss: How emotions work The importance of self-awareness The power of self-compassion and how to cultivate it How to build self-confidence Why failure is a necessary part of learning and improving How to respond to low mood and anxiety The foundations of good mental health  How to build a meaningful life Julie Smith: ‘Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?’ https://t.co/21WBG5HOcL 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, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of our mental and our physical health to help you make the small simple changes to your life to feel happier and healthier and today we're taking a deeper delve into our mental health and how we can use that to build a more meaningful life. Accepting all emotion states allows all of those emotions to take their natural course

as soon as we're not willing to have certain feelings we tend to block them out and then or try to with really quite unhealthy behaviors that then you know keep us feeling stuck so emotions don't just happen to us they're influenced by lots of different things so we have lots of ways that we can influence how we feel we can use the things like what we do and what we don't do or the state of our bodies or the focus of our attention and what we give our attention to that can influence how we feel. So we can use those things to affect our well-being and feel better. Before we delve into today's episode I wanted to let you know about our sponsor and a little note on our sponsor we only work with brands that I actually use and that I truly love we will never promote something that isn't totally authentic or something that I don't

believe in so for the next few months our podcast sponsor is Simprove a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. I was buying it for years before I even started working with them and I know that gut health is such a prevalent topic right now and something that so many of you are interested into. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of both our mental and our physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production and our mental health and keeping that right balance of good bacteria in our gut is absolutely essential and whilst our diet and lifestyles play a huge role in that, adding in live bacteria can really help too. The bacteria in Simprove which is a water-based supplement can survive that long

journey from the mouth to the gut where they're then able to multiply and support the microbiome. I truly swear by it and I really hope that you love it too. For anyone wanting to try it they've shared a 15% off code with us just use Ella15 which is valid on simprove.com within the UK and for any existing customers they also have a brilliant subscribers package too. Today's guest Dr Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist and a member of the British Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapy. Julie uses her social media presence to educate others on the importance of both understanding and managing our mental health and Julie has just written her first book which is actually

published today on the day of recording Why Has nobody told me this before the book draws on over a decade of experience as a clinical psychologist and explores topics such as managing anxiety low mood and self-doubt and building self-confidence offering practical evidence-based tools that truly support our mental health and help us build that more meaningful life so welcome julie first all, congratulations on publication day and thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I was actually just asking you off air, but I'd actually love to start there on how you came to publish the book today and what the last few years have looked like for you through the pandemic. Sure. So, well, I was working as a psychologist pre-pandemic providing psychological therapies and I noticed that well lots of people don't realize that within therapy there's quite a big educational aspect so you teach people a

little bit about how their mind works and how they can influence their mood and emotions that sort of thing and I found that lots of people once they had that bit of education they found it so empowering and useful that they were sort of raring to go. And, you know, lots of people were saying variations of why has nobody told me this before? You know, this isn't rocket science. This is really useful stuff and it's helping me to change my life. So I would sort of harp onto my husband about how this should be more available. People shouldn't have to pay to come and see people like me to find out these basic life skills. So yeah, my husband said, we'll make it available then let's go put it on YouTube or something. So we started to make some

videos and put them on social media. And at the same time, we discovered TikTok and tried to make some very short videos with sort of bite sized tips and things. And it just took off. I mean, I think that was the beginning of the pandemic and the first lockdown. And I think lots of people were not only on social media more because they were at home, but they were, you know, the fact that they hit follow on an account that was purely about mental health education says a lot about what we were all trying to deal with. But a lot of my messages were from people were around, give me more information. What's the details? How can I do this? What's the step by step?

And so the book has really been about providing that detail, you know, the sort of nitty-gritty of try this then try that and so there's lots of things like journal prompts in the in the book that help people to sort of break it down and and go through things in more detail. I remember when I started learning about health for my own personal journey just over 10 years ago now I remember thinking the exact same thing why has nobody told me this before because so many of the foundational parts of both our mental and our physical health actually really quite simple and once you start unlocking it as you said it's so empowering to feel like actually so much more is within our grasp as individuals then I think we often feel that it is and I wondered with your experience is there one thing or a collection of

things that you really feel you can't believe isn't a bigger part of the public along to therapy for example and they'd have an emotion that they wanted to get rid of you know maybe it was anxiety for example and it would be how can I make it just go away how can I make it disappear it's excruciating and we seem to have this sort of relationship with emotion in our society that it's something to fear or that it says something about who you are as a person rather than it being a normal human experience it's something to kind of battle and deal with and fight and pretend it's not there and just be happy and productive all the time and so when people feel something that's not constant happiness and positivity and motivation then they feel like

they're failing in some way or getting it wrong and so a lot of what happens in therapy and what I've tried to put in the book is changing our relationship or a perception of what it means to have an emotion and what to do with that to be able to welcome all emotion and to allow it to be there because it's a part of normal human experience yeah I really resonate with that I think this idea that we're so unable these days to accept that negativity or feeling low is normal. And obviously there's moments to address it and there's a continuum. But actually, it's not all kind of an Instagram perfect, shiny existence. And perhaps, and you'll tell me if this is wrong, but perhaps striving for that is part of the challenge with our mental health.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think all this sort of perfectionism that is perpetuated by everybody sharing their lives so publicly, it then really sparks that tendency in us all to compare each other. And whereas years ago, all we had was a peep through a living room window as we walked past someone's house down the lane. People used to talk about dressing the front window and showing your best off, you know, because that's what the neighbours could see. Now it's everything, isn't it? And every small moment has to be put out there and made to look perfect. And so a lot of my sort of videos online actually have been around just reminding people that what you see online isn't always real. But sometimes we just need that little reminder of just remember it's not everything. It's a slice of someone's day.

It's not the whole thing. Yeah, I'm very passionate about that. It's a highlights reel. Yeah, there's great things about that, but it's important it's not everything it's not it's a slice of someone's day it's not the whole thing yeah i'm very passionate about that it's a highlights reel yeah there's great things about that but it's important to remember that so i wonder julie if we could go back to the beginning in some way and understand as you said right when you first started speaking is that so empowering to understand actually how the mind works how do we form these emotions where does it come from sure so emotions are often they're seen as a sort of, you know, something that kind of happens to us or says something about who we are as a person. And actually, emotions are your brain making a guess about what's going on around you. So all of the time,

your brain is receiving information from the outside world through each of your senses. So it's taking information through your senses and through world through each of your senses. So it's taking information through your senses and through what's happening inside your body as information about what's happening and what you should do about it. So it'll take information from your heart rate and your blood pressure and your hydration levels and the light levels in your environment or the sound and all the things that are going on and then it produces a sensation a feeling that is essentially a guess about what's going on and what do we need to do about it so in a situation that is I don't know if you find sort of crowds difficult for example and you find yourself in a busy area that's quite noisy then your body will

start to respond to that and and it will give you a little bit of a busy area that's quite noisy then your body will start to respond to that and and it will give you a little bit of a stress response that just increases your alertness and says this doesn't feel safe this doesn't feel calm what what do we need to do about it so that increased alertness then allows you to make decisions about what you want to do about it and so emotions aren't sort of just happening to us then they are they're much more internal than they are external. And as a result, perhaps we can influence them more than we think. Things like what you do and what you don't do, what you think and what you give your attention to and what you avoid. And also the state of your body, so your physical state. And while we can't directly choose our emotions, so it would be great, wouldn't it, if we could kind of wake up in the morning and say, today I want to feel love and excitement.

We can't sort of directly make them happen in that way. But we know that emotions are so heavily influenced by those other factors, so what we think and what we do and don't do, those sorts of things, that we can use those to influence how we feel. So those things we can change, you know, we can choose what we do or don't do and we can choose how we treat our bodies, you know, and it's difficult to work with your thoughts, but it's possible and we can use those too and sort of mindset changes and stuff like that. So they're almost like weaves in a basket, though, all of those factors in terms of our experience. And so when we start to change those other things, our emotions have to change. You know, they start to be influenced by all of those other

things that we're taking control of and positive change starts to happen. And is that something that happens quite quickly or is that a kind of layered effect over time? It can feel quite dramatic in a moment. So I don't know if, let's say you listen to a kind of layered effect over time it can be it feel quite dramatic in a moment so i don't know if let's say you listen to a piece of music if that piece of music is really sad for example you might feel a rush of sadness it might trigger sad memories or something that gives you a rush of emotion but if you just change that track you could feel completely different within a short amount of time but in terms of working on things in therapy in terms of long term change so if you were trying to address low mood or persistent anxiety or something then those

changes tend to be more gradual and those changes compound over time so you focus on something smaller manageable and you repeat it repeat it repeat it and then you increase that slightly increase that slightly and then you get sustained change over time and so within that you mentioned low mood and I think one of the things you talk about a lot in the book which I'm sure every single listener can relate to is self-doubt and self criticism and we touched on earlier that sense of comparison I think can be all too familiar for people who are struggling with that self-doubt, with their self-esteem, are there clear places to start? Yeah, I've sort of devoted a whole section of the book to self-doubt because I think it's

something that really holds people back and something that we don't all understand because, you know, people don't talk about these sorts of things in this way. But, you know, self-doubt is normal and natural and it's a part of being human to question things that you're doing or to question your ability in something. And that's essentially trying to keep you safe. So, you know, there are physical threats, but there are also psychological threats. So the idea of taking on something and not doing well at it and feeling humiliated socially, for example, that's your brain saying, I'm trying to keep you safe from potential rejection or abandonment from your community

or whatever. So again, it's understanding that it's natural to feel that way, but also then choosing what you buy into and what you listen to. So, you know, the power of any thought is in how much you buy into it so you know as I walk in here today and sit down here with you I can listen to those thoughts that say oh you might go wrong or could you do this and I could give those lots of air time or I can acknowledge that that's a normal part of that slightly increased stress response of doing something new and then also give some air time to the other thoughts that that suggest yes you can do stuff like this and and so you can kind of take a step back from all of the thoughts that are popping into your head and always get a bird's eye view

of them and you can kind of acknowledge that yes there are lots of different thoughts which ones am I now going to choose to give my attention and focus to so it's trying to put a pause on that kind of spiralling. Yeah, so you don't have to stop those thoughts from arriving because they're natural and normal. The bit that you get to control is what you do next with it and how you respond to it and how much airtime you give it and how much you buy into it and whether you challenge it or step back from it and move on.

I like how you normalise it as well. And I know one of the topics we've covered on here before that was incredibly popular and really resonated with a lot of our listeners was imposter syndrome, which I think is probably heavily linked to that same conversation around self-doubt and our ability to kind of tap into what's normal, what's understandable and which areas we can look at there. Yeah. I mean, it's again, you know, imposter syndrome is one of those other things that most people will say that they have experienced. And especially if you're pushing yourself and challenging yourself to do new things and stretching your abilities, then it's going to happen. And part of sort of increasing your confidence involves pushing yourself to your limits and getting out there. So that imposter syndrome feeling is natural to a

degree. And I guess when it becomes a bigger issue is when it persists in every area of your life, you know, but it's natural for it to be present when you're pushing yourself, you're stepping outside of that comfort zone. So it's acknowledging that, yeah, that's going to be there and I'm going to take it with me. And I talk about this idea a lot in therapy is the idea that you don't have to feel 100% confident in something before you do it. You don't have to wait for that imposter syndrome thing to disappear. We can take it with us actually. And we can feel self-doubt and we can feel a sense of imposter syndrome and still choose to do the thing that matters most to us and are there practical tools that are helpful for this as well as having that conversation obviously if you find yourself in a moment for

example with this or you're doing a presentation at work you probably can't stop and write in a journal or do something else. But are there tools outside of that, in terms of trying to improve this relationship that we have with ourselves and our thoughts and perhaps limit some of those more negative conversations that we have with ourselves? Yeah, I think learning to talk to yourself in a different way is such an important life skill. And it's one that is a life practice as well I don't think there's one thing that you can do that completely changes everything from that moment onwards but it's a continuous practice that you have to keep sort of working on and changing that relationship

often involves introducing people to the idea of self-compassion as so instead of being your own you know worst critic and and that inner dialogue that we all have, you know, the way you talk to yourself, it can sound like a critic and a bully or it can sound like a coach and a best friend. And those speak very differently in each year and often talk to people about the idea of imagine if you were locked in a room 24-7 for a whole year with the worst bully you can imagine, whether that's someone you know or don't know. How might you feel at the end of that year? How would your mental health be? And how would your confidence be? And how would you deal with challenges?

It doesn't take too much imagination to realise that you probably wouldn't be at your best and you wouldn't feel confident or you wouldn't feel able to challenge yourself if someone had been sort of constantly criticizing you for example but if you'd lived with let's say your best friend for that time you know locked in that same room 24 7 for a year and you came out of that at the end of that year your mental health would be in a very different state and you by hearing different things and being spoken to in a different way, you would feel more confident, you would feel lots more positive emotion. And the reason we kind of go through that idea and imagine that is because actually the voice in your head is one that you live with 24-7.

So the relationship you have with yourself and the way that you choose to respond to things and speak to yourself in your head matters hugely in terms of creating emotion states and influencing your well-being and we have got listeners all around the world so I don't want to speak obviously for everyone but I feel certainly in the UK we have a kind of a culture identity of being self-deprecating and of that sort of tall poppy syndrome where you don't want to be standing out and I don't think we're necessarily great at thinking that we are great and there's a sense of if you almost talk to yourself in that way or you see yourself in that way that it's arrogant or it's egotistical how do we shift that narrative to create something that's much more compassionate

and it's not about trying to assert yourself above anybody else, but it is trying to say I am good enough. Yeah, yeah. And I think, for me, I always think about the idea of a coach, you know, you, we all want to do well at life. And when you think of some something or someone who is performing well, so let's take a professional athlete, a professional athlete would never dream of picking their high school bully to to coach them through elite performance they would carefully pick a coach who has their corner who has their back no matter what who is honest with them about where they're going wrong but knows the path that they want to take and so can help them steer in that direction and so if you want to to feel like you're doing

what you should be in life or doing what you should do and living in the way that you want to live, you need that inner voice that is the coach to tell you, yes, we're on the right path or no, no, we're steering off here. We need to get back on or, you know, someone that responds to you and your setbacks and human mistakes in a way that helps you to get back up rather than kicking you while you're down but it's really hard if you you know if you have a lifetime of habit of responding to yourself with you know relentless criticism and in a kind of bullying sense then it's really hard to turn around it can take lots of practice yeah and presumably is very rubbed off as well with the people that you're spending time with. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If we kind of hear other people, and certainly I found

that actually, in my career, as I sort of learned more and started to use the skills, and then I would perhaps be around friends, and I would hear the way that they spoke about themselves. And then you suddenly kind of get this new perspective on it. But wow, that's, that's really damaging. You know, that's a real shame that that someone speaks to themselves in that way and because people do it openly too don't they they make comments about themselves openly in front of other people that don't help them no absolutely and one of the other topics you you touched on which feels a great segue from that is motivation and obviously something that's naturally going to fluctuate in our lives but i think it's probably something that many of us are looking for a bit more of and I think again

can be one of those things we can be quite tough on ourselves because we don't feel like we're motivated enough how do you start to change that sense of emotion yeah I've dedicated a whole kind of section in the book to motivation because I feel like that's another thing that can hold us back and there's this sort of movement online, isn't there, about motivation and that we should always be motivated and sleep when you're dead and all that kind of thing and just be productive and just want to be productive all the time. And that's really not how humans work either. And, you know, motivation is not something you're born with. It's not a personality it's it's a sensation and a feeling just like any

other so there are certain things that will invite that feeling to be there more of the time but essentially it won't be there all the time it will it will ebb and flow and disappear sometimes and and that's another normal part of being human sometimes there are times when we have to work on okay how am I going to get this thing done that has to be done, even though I don't feel like it. But there are other times when we might enjoy the wave of emotion and work with it. So yeah, there are sort of two aspects to that really. Stop sitting on your aeroplane points and get big savings. So you can be somewhere you actually want to be like on a beach. Right now you you can save up to 25% in Aeroplan points

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be without it for a while so let's say I feel anxious about being outside after the pandemic you know I've got used to being at home and home feels like my comfort zone. And so going out is actually really difficult. I feel confident in my home. And that's great. But if I don't venture out of that, so if I only stay in the places where I feel confident, the confidence won't grow, and it could even shrink over time. So in order to build and grow confidence, we have to be willing to step out of those arenas where we feel confident, and sit with vulnerability for a while, you know of those arenas where we feel confident and sit with vulnerability for a while you know and feel that we're not confident and and continue to persist in that environment and what happens is then confidence grows because your brain works like

a scientist you know it wants evidence of seeing you be in this new arena and survive it and do okay and then once it gets enough evidence it tends to sort of habituate and the stress of being vulnerable will calm and then that's when your confidence builds over time I feel vulnerability is one of those things that so many of us know that embracing would probably support so many aspects of our life but is sometimes really challenging to do to peel back those various layers again is there anything in terms of tools that you recommend or ways of thinking that really support people and allowing them to be more vulnerable I presume both with themselves and actually with those around them yeah I think a lot of it has to do with changing our relationship with failure and creating a

safe space to fail and it's in us all, isn't it? You know, failure hurts every time. It's never easy and nobody sort of wants to fail or enjoys failing. But a lot of us also, when we fail at something or make a mistake, we see that as it's saying something about who we are as a person, that it means something about my intrinsic abilities to do this thing. Like, I don't know, if I say, I'm just not good at maths, it's just not my thing. So anytime that I then attempt some sort of mathematical problem, and I don't get it right, I'm going to tell myself, well, that's just because I'm not good at maths. So what's the point in trying? And when we take on that sort of perspective, we are more likely to give up in the face of challenge, and especially in the face of failure. Whereas if we take on the idea that failure is a necessary part of learning, so it

enables us to learn and improve, and that with continued effort, we can still improve. So you can get better over time, you you know we can improve our skills at something even if it doesn't come naturally then failure takes on a whole different meaning and so we give ourselves permission to fail and and then we get to learn from it because it becomes less slightly less painful you know it's not filled with shame it's it's filled with something else maybe it's frustration for example but that's much easier to deal with and then it's much easier to look at and say okay what did I get wrong and you know where can I improve how can I do better. Sounds like so much of this is wrapped up in that sense of self-compassion and just allowing ourselves to and everyone around us to be infinitely more human

and more fallible within that. Yeah and really sort of breaking the idea of we all have to be perfect or get everything perfect and that failure is in some way shameful and those sorts of things and I think sometimes these are cultural shifts that come with you know maybe a bit of education at the beginning and it's stuff that we can work on individually and collectively as a community I think. Yeah I agree I think it is it's much bigger than us as individuals I certainly think failure absolutely but I think also sometimes we see almost an enjoyment in other people's failures because of our insecurities. Yeah and often that comes with the very sort of competitive society and that sort of if we feel that we're all in competition and and and not together as a connected community

then it feeds that sense of envy or or joy out of other people's mistakes and failures and things and that's when we start to see other people's success as a sign that we're not doing so well rather than you know a connected group where we feel that we're happy for each other in their successes and things like that. So, I mean, it's a huge subject, isn't it? But, you know, hopefully from the sorts of things that I've included in the book, it allows us to really start at home. So, you know, start working on how you treat yourself. Because what I find is that once I was able to take on those skills and use them myself, that then transferred to how I would speak to my friends or what I would point out if they were not speaking to themselves nicely or how I speak to my children and those sorts of things. So it filters out, I think.

I was going to ask you, because you've got three children under 10, are there things that you do to support them with their mental health and making these sorts of skills and conversations part of their normal yeah I think I've I've tried really hard actually with sort of making mistakes and trying to be careful in how I approach mistakes and that I'm very open about the mistakes I make and that I'd make some and my daughter who's nine sometimes likes to sort of get involved and watch us make some of the the Instagram videos and things like that and I really wanted her to see that I don't get it right first time you know it takes me take after take sometimes and or most of the time and I wanted to see that that's that's how it works like it's okay to get it wrong 50

times because if the 51st time it works it was worth it so there's just little things like that that perhaps I wouldn't have thought of before and that maybe don't make a huge difference in that moment but hopefully it's all sowing seeds you know it's just a way of living that we make it okay to to make mistakes and try to encourage that idea that you can improve with effort I love that yeah. Yeah, so interesting becoming a parent and starting to take that all on board and very conscious of that with our girls and trying to create a really positive relationship as much as possible, both with each other and within themselves as well. But kind of moving on from that, two of the topics that you cover in the book in terms of everyday mental health

that I think almost all of our listeners probably have struggled with at some point or are close to people who have a both low mood and anxiety as I said two things that probably all of us certainly myself can can relate to when it comes to addressing those I'm sure there's a continuum and different things to focus on for different people. Are there clear areas that you feel we should all know? And why has no one told us this before? Yeah, I think we talked at the beginning about the idea that different things influence how you feel. I mean, I've included lots of sort of things like journal prompts to get people thinking about what's going on here. Something we do in therapy is someone will come in with say let's say low mood and you're not sure where to start so we just literally start mapping it out so we look at okay what's happening here's this feeling what do we do when that feeling arrives how do we respond to it

what you know what do you try and because inevitably people will try lots of things and the trouble is with both low mood and anxiety is the things that work in the moment. So the things that give us instant relief tend to be the things that keep the phone off and just sit and think about all of my regrets or the things that are making me feel low and just hide away. And in some ways, you know, there is there is room for taking a break and hiding away for a little while. But what that does in the long term, if it persists, is give us lots of time to ruminate and not look after ourselves, not move the body and get out and socialize and connect with other people. And so in the long term, those sorts of behaviors can maintain things like depression and low mood. And similar with anxiety. So, you know, if you feel

anxious, let's say in a supermarket, and the urge is to get out of there and escape it, and then avoid it if you can and the trouble is if you do that then you're reconfirming your brain's suspicion that this isn't a safe environment because you you get this instant relief when you leave the supermarket door phew oh we're safe now that was a that was a dangerous environment and so next time you have to go next time you're forced to go back because you need to, the anxiety response kicks off again. So often the more difficult things to do in the moment, like remain in that situation and work on sort of calming the body through breathing and things like that, the more difficult and slower response enable us to be freer from the anxiety or the low mood in the long run.

So interesting. And you mentioned that journaling and I feel like we've talked about that a lot. Is that something you feel as a practical tool is very, very helpful? Yeah, absolutely. Because I think a lot of the advice is to talk and talking is absolutely great in terms of helping people get through. But there are a lot of people out there who don't feel they can talk to either they don't have someone that they trust, or that they don't feel they've got the words or don't know how to express themselves. But when you need to sort of understand the problem so that you can work out how to make change and solve it, writing is the next best thing, I would say. And actually, you know, for me personally, that's something that I've always

used before I sort of knew the research behind it in terms of how helpful it was if I was struggling with something and wasn't sure how to sort of work it out in my head I would always write you know just write down what what's happening and how I feel and and sometimes that gives you this kind of bird's eye view of the situation and then it just becomes a little bit clearer or it gives you the chance to sort of healthfully express whatever you're feeling so that you can then move on from it and you also mentioned getting outside getting sunlight socializing with others again is there research on the power of all of these various tools to support our mental health yeah absolutely and there are these sort of i often call them the

basics or the foundations of good mental health. And it's almost similar to, you know, you have a sort of physical, people are aware of that sort of physical health immune system. And in mental health, you have these sort of basic foundations that I would say are social connection, nutrition, sleep and movement. And if you take anyone on this earth and you start messing around with those foundations, that person will become vulnerable to physical and mental ill health. So often I will start with those. If I'm working with someone, we just get into the habit of checking in on those. And sometimes I'll even encourage people to just write down those words on a post-it note, for example, and get them to kind of stick it on the inside of your wardrobe door or on your bathroom mirror

or something, somewhere where you'll see it every day. And just then ask yourself, out of those four things, how am I doing at the moment? You know, have I been getting to bed on time? You know, have I been eating well this week? If not, what is one thing I could do today to get back on track with it? Not necessarily huge new goals every day day but it's what is one

thing I could do today to turn back into the right direction with that thing so I think those things are absolutely essential because there's no amount of complex therapy that will battle against poor foundations we've got to have those it's so interesting isn't it because I think it's so easy to forego those and it's so easy to not associate going to bed an hour earlier really with what our mood is the next day but as far as I understand as well the research is really really clear that these things as you said they're just the absolute foundations from health and when you start to strip that away we become so vulnerable but it's so easy to forget because it doesn't seem that tangible to me certainly at least that necessarily what you make for dinner every night or the time you go to bed and switch off Netflix can really have such a powerful impact and I was curious

actually just on a kind of more macro level obviously we're seeing such huge challenges in our mental health across the country but also across the world at the moment. Do you feel that is perhaps linked to how disassociated we are with these foundations of our health these days? Yeah, I think there's all these different pushes, aren't there, too? Like we were talking earlier about this push online about you must be constantly motivated and productive and it's productivity over everything. And, you know, there is no there is no room to rest or, you know, replenish and those sorts of things that people then start to prioritise productivity over sort of health or looking after themselves. And actually, I think it's not also about doing these things perfectly, you know, I mean, just in the lead up to this book and writing the book

through the pandemic and having three children at home at the same time and that sort of thing. I've seen that in myself. And I was telling you off air how I actually sort of returned to your book to remind myself where I needed to be because I noticed through being busy and having deadlines, I was not eating so well. I was quickly grabbing something out the cupboard and calling it lunch because I wanted to get extra things done because I had deadlines or I was saying no to exercise because it felt negotiable. And often we'll kind of discuss these ideas in therapy with people actually about what are the non-negotiables,

taking control over what's negotiable and what's not a little bit more. There are lots of things we don't necessarily have choice over. If we've got bills to pay and so we've got you know certain number of hours of work to do and things like that it's difficult but it can be really interesting how we can kind of really make new choices once we kind of lay everything out on the table and see what are my values here and and what's leading me away from them absolutely and and that kind of constant need for productivity as well, which we actually talked about a couple of episodes ago, which the productivity track, which I think is so relevant.

One sort of last question on this is how our relationship with stress fits in to that and to our mental health as well. Yeah. So stress is something that, yeah, I mean, I just hear lots of people these days talking about burnout and it just seems so prevalent out there. And I think that has a lot to do with this drive for relentless productivity and increased productivity, you know, go faster, do more and that kind of thing. And I've done sort of lots of posts actually on burnout and how I'll always write in the beginning of a sort of caption on burnout. The first thing to do is take it seriously you know it's a serious health issue a burnout and I've been sort of discussing actually with my husband about we've had lots to do in the build

up to the book coming out and things like that and so I've not been practicing what I preach as much as I'd like to because we've had all these deadlines and so now is the time to okay get back on track so it's not about doing it perfectly it's about noticing when you've been taken off track because life is stressful and these things happen and then redirecting and coming back to what you know you should be doing for your health I can definitely relate to that I've been doing the same thing the last few weeks and as said it's just about being kind of compassionate in your conversation with yourself but then saying this is why you're not feeling so great at the moment but one last thing is you you also talk

about trying to live a more meaningful life versus a happy life and i think i'd really like to finish with this because you mentioned in therapy you often hear the phrase i just want to be happy i think we we hear that all the time any episode we have that has happiness in the title it's an absolute slam dunk because it's something that resonates with all of us. There's no human on this earth is that that's not chasing an element of happiness. But you say that trying to find meaning is much more important. Yeah, because, again, I think happiness is something we can feel in the moment, but it can't always be guaranteed because life is really tough at times and and we face all sorts of things that are really difficult you know like grief for example and things that you can't control but

will make happiness disappear for a little while and or for a long while for some people and so how do you then keep going you have to have some level of of meaning and purpose in your life that keeps you going when life is really, really hard. And so something that I included in the book were little ways that you could do quick values check-ins where you pretty much just look at, okay, what's important to me in my life right now? Because that changes as well, depending on what stage of life you're at. What are the most important aspects of my life? What kind of person do I want to be in those aspects of my life so let's say you know parenting or health or career lifelong learning those sorts of things what kind of person do I want to be what kind of attitude do I want to face

these challenges with and what concrete behaviors would show that I was on the right track with that and then asking yourself as well how am I doing in this area, given that this is my value, and this is how I want to live my life in this area? How am I living by that at the moment? And often get people to sort of rate that say out of zero to 10. So how closely am I living in line with that value right now? So for example, the sort of the health side for me might be kind of lower at the moment, because I've been so focused on work, and there's been lots going on. So that score will be lower. And then I would ask, how important is that area to me?

So on the same sort of scale. And I would say, well, actually, 10 out of 10, my health is everything. And then I have this disparity. OK, so it's really, really important to me, 10 out of 10. But actually, recently I've been pulled away from it. So it's more of a four in terms of how I'm living by it so there's a big disparity so then that's just an indicator to say this area needs some work this is where I need to focus my efforts for a little while to get that back up so it's just a really good way of sort of taking stock and changing direction if you need to

and to just be sure that you're living in line with the values that you know the things that are most important to you at that point in your life it also feels that if you let go of this need to be happy 24 7 365 days a year and as you said right at the very beginning allow yourself to invite in these very normal waves of emotion at the same time that arguably you'll probably ironically be happier in the long run yeah absolutely because you can sort of find your moments of happiness along the way and appreciate them and it just gives you that real sort of almost like an awe to kind of help you navigate through really difficult times it helps you to to keep that sense of hope

and the motivation to keep going when when life can get really tough so julie to wrap up we we always ask our guests to share three take-homes for our listeners and if there were three things that as a psychologist you thought everyone should know about dealing with their day-to-day mental health challenges and and to ultimately try and take those insights to live a more meaningful life what would those three things be the first one would be about acknowledging that emotions don't happen to us they're influenced by lots of things so we are not completely at the mercy of how we feel there are things that we can do to influence how we'd feel we don't want to control it and and suppress things but there are things we can do to invite positive emotion states and manage in a healthy way the negative

emotion state so it's encouraging that kind of sense of hope there are things we can do to help us through and in that sense sort of following on from that number two would probably be about being able to accept all emotion states so you know life gets difficult and life gets great at times is being able to accept all of those as a part of human experience because if we're not willing to accept all of the feelings that might come then we can find ourselves in tricky positions where we're trying to block feelings out or they feel intolerable and so we take on pretty unhealthy behaviors to try and cope with it once we're willing to allow an emotion to wash over us like a sort of wave then it will take its natural course and it will increase in intensity

but it will then also come back down again and then number three would be about committed action so allow yourself to feel everything that comes along and keep steering yourself back towards a life of meaning and purpose the things that matter most to you so always keep an eye on what matters most and keep turning back to it when emotions or other things pull you away from it finally on that our podcast is called Delicious Ways to Feel Better and I wondered if you could tell us what the one thing is that you do every day to feel better? Well I guess for me the initial response is exercise always helps me but given that I have been terrible at getting exercise in when I had sort of the book to write and things like that. Actually, at that time, for me, it was music. So if I needed a lift and energy or to invite sort of motivation

or just a lifted mood through, you know, lockdown and things like that, I find putting on very carefully chosen piece of music would help me to, and I love sort of dancing around the kitchen with the kids and stuff like that. I think music is so powerful in changing how you feel do you have a track of choice oh there's so many probably really embarrassingly cheesy yeah mine would all be embarrassingly cheesy mine would all be Taylor Swift so so you're safe here no fear Julie well thank you so much for your time today it's been brilliant and Julie Julie's book, Why Has No One Told Me This Before, is out now. It is really brilliant, really, really worthwhile.

I think for everyone, but in particular, if you're struggling with some of the emotions that we've talked about today. And as she mentioned, lots more helpful, supportive tools and tricks within that. We will be back again later this week. Thank you so much for listening today and have a lovely day.

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