How The Mind Affects The Body (E49)

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss the how the mind affects the body and look at a study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer.

Transcript & Show Notes

In this episode, Marie mentions a book by Dr. Helena Popovic, called NeuroSlimming: Let your brain change your body. Also, Pete mentioned someone and accidentally mis-identified him, his name is Ian Hickey.

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: So Pete, today we’re talking about how the mind affects the body.

P: Ooohh [Twilight Zone noises]

M: And maybe how the body affects the mind?

P: Oh, yes, It’s a very intrinsic relationship,.

M: Definitely, it’s so linked, and I think throughout western culture in particular we’re really coming late to the party on this one.

P: [Laugh] We may be, but we’re definitely there. There’s so much more research out there now that tells us why physical and mental work is good and how the two are very..  have a very symbolic relationship. And I think that’s where the positive psychology movement has made a lot of advances for people. People have definitely felt that in my workplace, people are much more aware of their mental health and how being physical and moving has power over that, and also how much your mental state has power over your physicality.

M: For me, I’m fascinated with the Gut Mind research.

P: Microbiomes!

M: Yes!

P: [Laugh] See how excited we get over science, oh my god I feel like I’m on ‘The Bing Bang Theory’.

M: [Laugh]

P: I Am Not Sheldon!

M: You are so far from Sheldon.

P: [Laugh] Please don’t let me be Wolowitz. I’m not Jewish! Oy vey..

M: [Laugh] Who’s ahhh..

P: Rajesh?

M: Penny.

[Laughter]

P: We have a Penny in our group, I’m not going to say his name. [Laugh]

M: All good. So anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen the latest research and books and shows and everything that’s exploding around this topic of gut-brain-health; The long and the short of it is the latest research is showing that the health of your gut, so your belly, where you’re food goes –

P: Mmm hmm.

M: – is directly linked to the health of your brain. And having imbalances in your belly or poor diet can lead to things like depression.

P: Definitely and a million other issues as well, such as Parkinson’s disease, degenerative diseases, inflammatory diseases, crone’s disease, celiac disease that sort of stuff all can be linked back to the Microbiome. It’s a really interesting… There’s a great show called ‘Searching for Super Human’ on the ABC channel in Australia, you can download all of that stuff still on ABC ivew, a little plug for ABC there. It’s a really good introduction to the concept of Microbiomes and also how much power our brain has over us. And I think we’re going to probably ref – I’ll probably reference that today as we talk this through. [Laugh]

M: We’ve also got some leading world leading researchers in particular over at UNSW and I saw a talk last year on this, and I will put in the show notes because it’s escaping me right now. The book that I got [‘NeuroSlimming: Let your brain change your body’] and leave the author [Dr. Helena Popovic], the researchers name in the show notes as well.

P: There’s a lot of stuff down at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Ian Richie… [Ian Hickey] I think that’s the right professor?

M: We’ll make sure it’s right in the show notes as well.

[Laughter]

P: Really exciting stuff.

M: A big call out to our show producer, Lea.

[Laughter]

P: Who does a marvellous job of-  

M: Of cleaning up our mistakes.

[Laughter]

P: [Singsong voice] Thanks Lea.

M: So what started us on discussing how the mind affects the body was, of course, a research study.

P: [Sarcastic tone] Of course, gotta love research studies..

M: [Laugh] Called the Hotel Maid study.

P: [Laugh]

M: Well, that’s what I named it.

P: [Laugh]

M: I’m sure it’s got some really…

P: Artistic licence there Muz?

M: Yeah. There is a really long, boring, hard to understand research appropriate title but I’m calling it the Hotel Maid study.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And it’s by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, and she has done so much good work in researching in positive psychology over the years.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And this is just one of many supercool studies.

P: [Laugh]

M: I think she did the coolest ones to be quite frank.

P: Okay.

M: There’s some really um, really funky and fun studies out there, and Ellen’s done two that I’m aware of.

P: [Laugh]

M: But this one the Hotel Maid study, I’ll set it up for you.

So she went to a bunch of hotels and divided employees, maids of those employees into group one and group two.

In group one, she came in and told the maids and the cleaners all about the importance of exercise, how it contributes to lowering your heart rate and your blood pressure and makes you healthier and all of the raft off positive physical and mental benefits that you get from doing its exercize.

P: Ok.

M: We all know.

P: Sounds like my life coach.

M: [Laugh] We all know it. So she went and told them how to such eggs, right.

P: [Laugh]

M: And then she did, ran a bunch of tests on them and left.

P: And just walked out the door?

M: Yep.

P: Thanks and bye.

M: Yep, pretty much.

With group two. She did exactly the same thing.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Importance of exercise, how it contributes to physical and mental health. And then she drew the connection to what the maids do day in and day out.

P: Mmm.

M: And said, you know, when you’re lifting your arms up and shaking the sheets that’s actually using your muscles, and when you’re vacuuming and all of the things that you do day in, day out and a lot of you may not realise, because I can see here on your reports were that you filled in on the way in, a lot of you say that you don’t do any exercise, but I can tell you for eight hours a day when you’re doing your shift. That is all exercise.

P: I’m a big believer in that.

M: And so she then did the tests and left.

P: Thanks and bye.

M: [Laugh] So a month later, she came back and redid all the tests. And lo and behold, when you tell people to suck eggs, nothing changes, right?

P: [Laugh]

M: So there was no change in behaviour in either group. No one did anything differently. [whispers] I think a lot of doctors could learn from this.

P: Ok.

M: And my friend Kelly exercise physiologist. Physios, a lot of people could learn from this. You tell people go away and do three times 10 reps of this calf raising exercise.

P: [Laugh]

M: And you’ll get better. And people go ‘uh huh.’ And then they forget it –

P: – as soon as they walk out the door.

[Laughter]

M: So lo and behold, all the maids went, ‘uh huh’ and then did nothing, right?

P: [Laugh]

M: But, but, but!

P: [Laugh]

M: Otherwise this would be the most boring story in the world.

P: [Laugh] Get on with it, keep going.

M: [Laugh] But group two believed they were getting more exercise than before.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And this belief led to a radical change.

P: What happened Marie?

M: [Whisper] Radical change.

P: Tell us Marie.

M: So Group two had less depression, less anxiety, more positive moods and higher self-esteem and confidence and greater job satisfaction.

P: That’s the big one.

M: So all of that is positive mental health impacts. Physically, their weight decreased significantly.

P: [Gasp] Hear that all you housewives of wherever you are?

M: [Laugh]

P: Go out and do some domestics [laugh].

M: As did their BMI, their Body Mass Index, and their blood pressure went down. So they got all the benefits from during exercise simply because they believed that what they’d always been doing was now exercise. Not just a boring job.

P: [Laugh] I’m ticking the boxes, yay!

M: [Laugh]

P: I think it’s so true. There’s such a benefit to the placebo effect. Now, being in therapy myself and someone that works with people day in, day out, and trying to get them better in whatever way, shape or form. One of the first things I talk about with my new clients is, if you don’t think I have achieved anything, don’t come back. There’s no point if you don’t trust the people that are working with you and trying to help you and giving you these exercises, that you don’t do. Or at least if you’re trying to do them. If you don’t believe they’re actually of benefit to you, it’s not gonna have the right effect. The brain has a lot to do with keeping us motivated than keeping things happening and working through, and that flow on effect to actual physical recovery is definitely linked as we’re seeing with the research.

M: So the fact that I didn’t buy into all this positive psychology BS.

[Laughter]

M: For so long, actually means that I was never going to benefit from it until I started buying into it anyway.

P: I agree.

M: That is a weird mind… I can’t say the F word.

P: It’s kind of like the emperor’s new clothes.

M: [Laughter]

P: It is. You’re just walking around naked until you actually believe what’s going on.

M: Yeah, the question is what do other people think?

P: [Laugh]

M: What are you wearing?

P: [Laugh] Better go put your clothes on… I get that all the time.

M: You so do, girl put some clothes on.

P: [Laugh] Anyway, we digress.

M: Yes. So look, this is, and I read this study and loved it, love, love, loved it. The fact that these people thought that what they’d always been doing was exercise, and they’ve reframed how they saw what they were doing, [and it] led to huge benefits.

P: Yep

M: And for me, the take home of all of this is to actually, take some time to look at my week and the small amounts of incidental exercise I do. And believe me, they’re small because I work from home.

P: [Laugh]

M: So I walk five steps to get from my desk to the toilet and maybe eight steps to get from my desk to the kitchen. There’s not much else going on for a lot of days and I spend during Covid a lot of time in my home. So it’s about when I do go out shopping, making sure that I park at the back of the parking lot.

P: Yep.

M: Or take the stairs if I do go out, things like that.

P: It’s those small things that do accumulate and as we’ve realised with the Covid experience, incidental exercise has decreased greatly.

M: Yeah.

P: And a lot of people aren’t moving as much and it’s the movement that helps to stimulate a lot of that brain activity that goes towards positive thinking, feeling all those good [hormones] dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin levels, all that sort of contribution.

M: Yep. So my challenge to myself is to look at all those little incidental things and to now call them exercise. And to tick that off.

[Laughter]

P: I like it. You’re sounding like my mom.

M: [Laugh]

P: I’ll tell this story though, this is a personal story. I have these visions of when I was a little boy, you know ages 5 to 8 of my mother doing domestics. Now mum was 5 ft four. She’s no longer 5 foot 4, she’s a lot shorter that that now. But mum would get her shoulder behind a bookcase full of books and move it so that every week she could clean the skirting board. This was every week. Mum was diligent about it.

M: That’s dedication.

P: Oh yeah. And that happened in the entire houses. So she would shift every wardrobe, every cupboard. She would pull it out and clean.

M: Now that’s exercise.

P: Huge exercise. Now Mom has never been an exerciser. We have one photo of mum in a netball team when she was maybe 20, it was really funny.

M: [Snort laugh]

P: My mother on a netball court. Wow, that’s really weird. But Mom has even an exercise that Mom is now 85 and she’s still getting around her own home. And she’s still doing her gardening and so forth. Admittedly, she’s got some health issues because she hasn’t maybe exercised as much as what she should have. But what has saved her, I think a lot, is that she was so determined of her housework. That was weightlifting. I mean, a bookcase full of –

M: But did she see it is weight lifting?

P: No, she just saw it as work.

M: Because what we’re saying now is if she’d seen it has weight lifting. She wouldn’t have those even small health issues you were talking about, right?

P: Maybe, quite possibly. But it is about clocking what you do throughout the day. And just because you’re not going to the gym doesn’t mean that you can’t be doing some movement and doing some loading and doing some resistance work.

M: Yes. Now moving back to how that relates to mind and body.

P: Did I go on a tangent?

M: Yes, you did.

P: [Laughter]

M: But I know that you’re really passionate about stuff and we should all do exercise. I’m just saying think about all the little things you do as exercise and then you can get off the hook.

P: [Laugh] I don’t need to go to the gym I did vacuuming.

M: What? Look that’ll get your heartrate up if you do it properly.

P: Absolutely, it does.

M: [Laughter]

P: So the power of the brain in that, that’s what matters?

M: Yes, absolutely.

P: [Laugh] I’ve got some research here from some of the journals from post-traumatic stress disorder and some really big advancements that have been going on in Australia with Mirjana Askovic a Psychologist with service for treatment and rehabilitation of torture and trauma survivors.

M: Say that ten times fast?

P: Yeah.

Now she has been doing a lot of work with traumatic stress disorder people about retraining brain activity and trying to not focus on reliving trauma but advancing positive mood thoughts with the brain, which actually helps with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, all these secondary benefits and its using video games.

M: Oh!

P: It’s getting a person, instead of talking about the trauma of being a refugee and having to get a boat and come to Australia, she sits in front of a television, and they have to power a plane with good thoughts, positive thoughts and there’s two other planes on either side of them and if those planes start to take over, they have to work harder with their positivity and recalling happy memories, good thoughts, things that make you laugh, to power that plane along and that training is helping to promote levels of serotonin, oxytocin and those lovely neurotransmitters, which helps with the secondary incidences of depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, really amazing stuff.

M: I love a few things there. So first thing is that a lot of the science that you’re talking about there is really similar when we talk about gratitude about training your brain to recognise the positive.

P: Absolutely.

M: And you need to train it just like a muscle, right?

P: Yep.

M: It is a muscle.

P: [Laugh]

M: In that sense.

P: [Laugh] I’m going to leave that one alone…

M: In that sense it is like a muscle.

P: [Laugh]

M: We’ll leave it there and we might get angry emails.

P: [Laugh]

M: You’ve got to train it. You’ve got to train your brain to not focus only on negative, and get it to focus on positive.

P: Yeah, absolutely. For sure, and it works. The success rate of this program at the moment is 80%. That’s huge.

M: That’s crazy.

P: It’s great.

M: And then the other thing that I’ll chime in off the back of that is personally after I had my motorbike accident. I absolutely do think that you need to talk about it first. But there does come a point we’re talking about it is only reinforcing the negative. It’s not helping you to move forward.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: So when I first used to tell the story of what happened, I would shake uncontrollably and I noticed probably after like the 20th time I told it, you know countless doctors, my family, my close friends would ask you what happened and probably a good 20 times in two weeks later, I noticed I wasn’t shaking as much and I wasn’t so tense when I was telling the story there was definitely a physiological impact to me, reliving that.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And telling the story. And the other one was that probably a good six weeks after the accident, the doctor was in one day and reached for my knee and I flinched.

P: Mmm.

M: He hadn’t even touched me and I flinched. I was again just so protective of that leg that I’d nearly lost. And he says to me, ‘You’re going to have to do something about that or it’ll become a thing.

P: [Laugh]

M: He finished up his consult and he walked out and I looked up at my husband and I was like ‘do what?’

P: [Laugh]

M: How do I not flinch?

[Laughter]

M: But you know, good old Google helped us out and we spent a lot of hours trying to untrain that flinch reaction.

P: Oh yeah, it’s huge, I’ve worked with some amazing people with that. I’ve had a woman with Parkinson’s and I worked with her and she had major traumatic stress from incidences in her previous life and it took us a good 18 months, but we’ve got to the point where she could handle me touching her rib. And I remember the treatment and I remember the day and it was a massive celebration for both of us because she didn’t flinch. She didn’t lock up, she didn’t respond in that typical fashion.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: 18 months. It’s a big trust exercise, but it shows that you can actually train that response and those emotional triggers to a better place.

M: Absolutely. So our conclusion then is that the mind affects of body and the body affects the mind.

P: [Laugh] The link is there. Definitely, there’s countless things you could pull out [of the research].

M: So I do you want to leave us with one last story. And it is from the same researcher at Harvard, Ellen Langer, and in 1979 she got a bunch of elderly men and put them into an environment that looked like 1959.

P: Aahhh.

M: And she asked them for the whole week to wear clothes that they would have worn in 1959, to eat what they would have eaten for breakfast, to pretend they’re back in their jobs at that time that their kids were young and from that time. And to pretend for the entire week that they were 20 years younger than what they were, and off the back of that, they had random people look at photos before and after and on average strangers thought that these people were three years younger after they came out.

P: Wow.

M: And not only that, these men saw a huge range of positive physical and mental impacts from just spending a week pretending to be 20 years younger. [Laugh]

P: Put yourself in that position. Put yourself around that idea of going. I’m gonna act like I am 50.

M: It’s not even that it’s tricking your mind.

P: Yeah.

M: Actively tricking your mind into impacting your body. So their eyesight got better, their hearing go better, the arthritis was less pronounced. The physical impact from them pretending for a week to me 20 years younger were amazing.

P: The power of brain activity.

M: Yeah.

P: There’s other stories of that with Parkinson’s disease and dementia and so forth that’s come out as well that’s lovely. I’ll just very quicky throw this in.

M: Yep.

P: This lovely lady, they were doing sound therapy, so music therapy.

M: Ohh.

P: Finding the music that applies to that person’s life from when they were younger.

M: Yep.

P: And these people who do not recognise anyone, sitting in a vegetable state. They put this old lady with the headphones on, and she started swinging her arms and clapping and being so mobile with this lovely music that made her feel like she was 20. And then she turned and looked at the man sitting next to her and went ‘Oh! I know you. You’re my son.’

M: [Gasp]

P: It’s the first time that she recognised him in two years.

M: Awe.

P: It’s such an advertisement for training your brain and doing things that link your brain activity to positive outcomes.

M: Absolutely.

I know we’ve spoken about positive affirmations before, but there is so much to explore in this. And I think we’re only just tapping into the potential of our minds to help us live happy and healthier lives.

P: Yeah.

M: And I think we’ll end it there.

P: End it there. What a lovely line to end on. [Laugh]

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

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