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Happiness and Health (E63)

by

Happiness for Cynics Podcast

This week, Marie and Pete talk about how happiness leads to better health, but does being healthier make you happier?

Transcript

[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 I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: We’re on.

P: Hello.

M: Hello, welcome back.

…

P: Oh!

M: That’s you, you’re up, laugh!

P: I thought it was you!

M & P: Laughter!

P: Welcome back to this week’s episode of Happiness for Cynics.

M: Yes, we are talking about happiness literacy, this week.

P: Ooh, I like this word.

M: And it’s tied to other types of literacy.

P: Mmm.

M: And so we’re going to talk about other types of literacy that society today says we should have.

P: Yes, and having the understanding of how to use that literacy and how to use it for the best outcome –

M: Absolutely.

P: – later on in life and how it sets you up for later in life.

M: Absolutely. And so, we are going to focus in a little bit on health and happiness and health literacy and how that ties to happiness literacy.

P: Yep.

M: And we know we’ve discussed many, many times, all the research that shows that being healthier makes you happier.

P: Definitely.

M: But the question we’re looking to answer today is does being happier make you healthier?

P: I like the twist on this, laugh.

M: Yes, does it go the other way? And when we first, I think in episode one we talked about what makes people happy. We talked about negative affect.

P: Mmm.

M: So all the crap that goes wrong in your life. Positive affect, all the good stuff that happens and how they give you momentary bumps and troughs in your happiness level. And then there’s pretty much mindset, let’s be honest.

P: Yeah.

M: It’s what else you do that is within your control, that impacts your happiness.

P: Mmm.

M: And that’s things like practising gratitude, having good and strong social connections, having purpose and meaning in your life and having healthy mind and body habits.

P: Mmm

M: So, health is a major foundation for happiness benefits.

P: And for happiness itself, from some of the stuff that I’ve been reading. So we might mention those further down the track.

M: Yep, absolutely. So really, what we’re talking about here is how much does your health impact your happiness and your well-being, your satisfaction with life?

P: Well, hugely, I think. I think that if, because if illness and disease is around, it’s very difficult to be positive. Let’s face it, when you’re sick, you just want to crawl into bed and hug a pillow and have a warm cup of tea.

M: Yep.

P: It doesn’t allow you to be thinking proactively and to be positive in your outlook in terms of life goals and achievement. If you’re worrying, we know that if you’re worried about stress and putting food on the table, then the idea of spending two hours working on your happiness levels just doesn’t come into it.

M: I think also there’s a certain point where you go back to living a life of decreased health and you find ways to find happiness so temporary or even permanent disability.

P: Mmm.

M: You move on, you find a way and it might not be at a level that was the same as before, pre-accident or pre-illness etcetera. But we’re very resilient as far as animals go. Humans are very resilient people, and there’s almost a rebound after a major trauma or illness where you can often times end up happier than you were before.

P: So, it’s a conduit to a greater level of happiness.

M: Yes, so you might have decreased health. But you are so much more grateful for everything you do have and that translates into being happier.

P: Mmm, and possibly the lever as well, like it makes you more grateful because

M: Absolutely.

P: you’re walking the street again, in the sunshine, makes you go ‘Yeah! I couldn’t do this two years ago.’

M: Yeah, and it’s called post traumatic growth.

P: Oh.

M: So, there’s a whole field of study around this, definitely. So health and poor health can actually lead to better happiness levels but day to day, I think you’re absolutely right. And then there’s, then there’s that step further, people with chronic pain in particular.

P: Mmm, mmm.

M: It is really hard to be happy when you’re just trying day in, day out to fight, to not let the pain sink you.

P: Absolutely, that is a real negative cycle that keeps so many people in a downward spiral.

M: Yeah, and in depression.

P: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a huge issue, chronic pain and where we’re seeing more chronic pain coming through in health data at the moment, we’re getting better at diagnosing chronic pain. We’re also recognising it more a lot and bless my mum she’s like ‘We didn’t have any of this crap when I was around.’ And I’m like ‘No mum, we didn’t know what it was. We had no, no way of diagnosing it.’

M: Yep.

P: The terms weren’t there and we’re getting better at identifying issues now. That maybe aren’t, we don’t know exactly the causes, but we’re still willing to look at them. And even in the health education that is out there, people are being encouraged to look at social factors and mental factors rather than just looking at the biological model of health, which looks directly at “Are you sick?”

M: I think the other great thing that’s happened in the last 10 years or so, and a lot of people are still cynics, –

P: Laugh!

M: Gotta throw that word in.

P: Gotta put that out there, laugh.

M: Yep, it is the point of the show.

– is that we’re actually giving credibility to the Eastern way of thinking, which is tying mind and body together, it is one, it is one system.

P: Mmm.

M: You cannot separate one from the other. You can’t, we are one united system and so you have to look at mind and body together and treat mind and body together.

P: Mmm.

M: And for Western science, we’ve often separated the two.

P: Well, it’s even, it even goes further back than just Eastern philosophy. If you look at ancient cultures, so the definition of indigenous health is a connection to the land, so it even takes that one step further of it’s not about you it’s about your connection with the land and with the community. So, the ancient cultures or those older, older cultures of which the Eastern culture is part of the definitely have that relationship between mind-health, body-health and all things moving forward.

M: Yep, absolutely. So, we started this out by talking about being happy literate, but we wanted to look at health literacy.

P: Health literacy, yeah.

M: And you’ve been doing a lot of study on this recently.

P: I have! I feel like I’ve got I’ve got things behind me now!

M: Laugh.

P: I have references! I did a reference list for the first time! Laugh.

M: Laugh!

P: That was interesting.

M & P: Laughter!

P: And I do have to give a shout out to one of my lovely clients who got so excited when I said I was doing a reference list. She’s an academic and at the beginning of her apartment she went “Can I have a look.”

M: Laughter!

P: And then she spent 20 minutes fixing my references, laugh. So lovely Jill, thank you so much, you gave me a reference list education in our appointment, laugh.

But yes, health literacy really, really important. How to understand health and understanding the health system so that you can use it for your own benefit.

M: So that you can get the best health outcomes.

P: Definitely. And this all comes at the beginning stages of your life. If you can understand things when you’re 20 and be putting things in place. So, putting practises into place taking part in healthy behaviours this sets up good social conditioning which lasts you into your eighties and nineties and beyond.

M: And I think the reason why this is new and why your mom is like, ‘we didn’t have this stuff before!’

P: Laugh.

M: Because, sorry mum, people used to just die.

P: It’s true.

M: Yep.

P: Yep.

M: We didn’t treat this stuff. Cancer was a death sentence.

P: People were dying earlier, we weren’t able to treat chronic illness early.

M: Yep.

P: And it was, it had a huge effect.

M: Chronic or acute. We couldn’t [treat it] before, it was it was a death sentence. So that’s firstly and secondly, the sheer volume of data that is produced on a, I was going to say daily, but hourly basis in our world is astronomical, absolutely astronomical. There’s a great start that I love to point to. So the average person in their lifetime a hundred years ago used to read as much information as is in one issue of The New York Times.

P: Ok.

M: And if you think about it, so [just] one issue of The New York Times is what they would know over their lifetime.

P: Ok, wow.

M: We read one of those every day. Plus, we have Google and Facebook and work and so much information at our fingertips, and so we’re consuming so much more were not necessarily retaining it all, let’s be frank.

P: Laugh, no. Well, our short-term memory is editing a lot more now.

M: Well, it has to. There’s so much more, we’re being bombarded as humans with so much more information and the average doctor cannot, the average GP who’s your first line of defence against all of your medical issues, can’t be across the latest in every field.

P: No.

M: In every medical field. They can’t, they just physically can’t and this is why I’m really excited about AI doctors.

P: Laugh!

M: I think with your, with your physical person, you’re human touch Doctor, combined, they can do fabulous things. But health Literacy is a thing now because if you’re not health literate, you can have really poor health outcomes. But if you are health literate, you can survive well into your eighties, nineties, you know, up to 100, living an agile and healthy and happy life and contributing to society.

P: Mmm.

M: But if you get that wrong, you can not only die a lot earlier, but you could also just live a really poor quality of life from a health perspective which impacts your happiness for your last 20, 30 years.

P: They talk about this a lot with the disability care and the disability adjusted life years expectancy.

So you may be living until you’re 60. But 30 of those years I spent in care and in a nursing home because you haven’t got the ability to be able to look after yourself. And it’s a stat that they’re looking to change in terms of our managing of disability care and aged care as well.

M: Mmm hmm. Yeah, I couldn’t support it more and again, there are so many people who were so much worse off than I was. But after my motorbike accident, I was stuck at home in a wheelchair without a lot of the support because it was a temporary disability, not a permanent disability.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: And I was isolated, completely isolated. My ability to participate in society was stripped from me completely.

P: Mmm.

M: And I…

P: And as you pointed out, we need that social interaction to maintain our happiness levels or to keep ourselves buoyant.

M: Absolutely. And you have a lot of elderly people who are just not stable on their feet or have health conditions that limits them to home.

P: It does.

M: It’s safe at home, right?

P: Especially if the models are that they’re going to move towards a home-based care, which has come out of the royal commission recently.

M: Yeah, absolutely. So, you can stay at home, but that’s a lot lonelier place to be.

P: It can be yeah. That has to be managed and supported through community networks and integrated health system, which they’re also talking about.

M: So, I think we’ve pretty much given the answer away we know that being happier makes you healthier, but being healthier does make you happier as well.

P: Definitely makes a difference.

M: So you have some studies.

P: I do, laugh.

M: Speaking of your reference list.

P: I do. Well it actually goes in terms of actually talking about location as well, that socioeconomic indicators, so those people who are more wealthy or less wealthy has an impact on our ability to be taking part in actions that contribute to our happiness and to our longevity.

So there’s a lot of work from Darwin and Drewnowski in New York who talk about the socioeconomic influences in regards to health education and access to the health system.

M: So, health education or access. I get access. If you’re poorer, you can’t get the greatest doctor because you might not have private health insurance.

P: Or you can get to a doctor because then they’re not in your area. You have to travel.

M: Yes, okay, so look, that’s, that’s to me, a no brainer, but coming back to literacy.

P: Mmm, hmm.

M: Why are poorer people not getting access to information, which is free a lot of the time, right?

P: It is, but one of the one of the factors that they pointed out here is that, for example if you take youth health literacy in our remote and rural communities, people aren’t getting to school in our rural and remote communities. The rates of year seven entry are low. In a study in 2009, year seven entry rates in rural and regional areas of Australia at 67%, 54% and 24% respectively.

M: Rural and regional?

P: Rural, regional and remote, [Year 7 entry rates for 2009]

  • Rural – 67%
  • Regional – 54%
  • Remote – 24%

M: Ok.

P: If we look at Indigenous populations in an urban setting. So, a disadvantaged group, but in an urban setting, [Year 7 enrolment rate is] 63.1%.

P: So the access to school is lower in those geographically challenged locations. And then if we look at some of the other people that are talking about, what that does to us in terms of access to health.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: The school acts as a link to the health system because you’re getting mentored into good behaviours. You’re getting access to information, which is coming through the school system that talks about nutrition, talks about getting enough sleep, talks about giving you the information to negotiate the health system and to understand what it means when you’re going for a Pap smear or your looking after you health into your fifties and sixties.

M: I didn’t get that. We rolled condoms on bananas.

P: Laugh! But you remember that.

M: And we were told don’t smoke and don’t do drugs.

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: But I think at that point it was so, you know, adults telling you not to do it, so everyone went out and had a smoke just to see what the fuss was about, you know.

P: True, true.

M: Yeah, look, I think maybe things have evolved a little bit. We started talking about nutrition in P.E. (Physical Education) a little bit, but I hope that things have evolved because obviously, as we’re showing here, the healthy you are, the happy you are. And if it’s going to be such a negative affect, so we go back to the negative affect on positive affect.

P: Yep.

M: These are things that a lot of the time are out of your control or you know they’re situational. If you could do anything to impact the negative affect in your life, such as knowing that you should choose a salad over a burger.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: Just knowing that, then it’s going to impact your life and you’ve only got one life.

P: There’s a study about that in Deakin University.

M: Oh, listen to you!

P: Laugh!

M: Tell me, tell me about your study Pete?

P: Felice Jacka of Deakin University in Australia did a study on the therapeutic impact of a healthy diet.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And what she found was that she took a group of people who were depressed and on psychotherapy and taking antidepressants.

Half were given nutritional counselling and then the other half were given one on one counselling. So a social connection and trying to establish which group came out better and what they found was the people who engaged in the healthy eating had a significantly happier response than the group that were having the additional companionship.

M: Mmm.

P: This comes bounding back to that social connection. We need social connections. But in this instance, what they’re saying is that the change in diet actually had a bigger impact.

M: Well, social connection with the therapist is a bit of a loose social connection.

P: Well, true…

M: I do hear what you’re saying about diet, though, and I think that’s fabulous and a great result. But if you could allow people to go socialise with their friends at the pub versus spend an hour talking about how –

P: Well, I guess we’re looking at depressed people.

M: [someone] bullied me, laugh.

P: Yeah, we’re talking about psychotherapy. We’re talking about people who are clinically depressed.

M: Yeah, a different type of social [interaction].

P: True.

M: I wouldn’t pick that one necessarily, but I think it is super interesting – don’t get me wrong – that food can have such an impact.

P: There is a second study at the University of Konstanz in Germany supports the same thing.

M: Yep.

P: It says, diet that was based on vegetables and fruit over time had a larger share of the overall happiness than the group that we’re on a high sugar diet.

M: And I think we’ve spoken out blue zones where the healthiest and longest living people live before and there’s a few things that you see across the board. So there’s Okinawa in Japan, Bar-bag…

P: Laugh.

M: Bar-bagia [Barbagia] in Sardinia, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica and Linda Loman in California. And these air all small communities where people are more likely to live to 100. So they’re small, and scientists looked at whether that meant it was just a gene thing or whether it was life choices.

P: Ok.

M: And definitely it’s come down to life choices. And there’s a few things that all these communities have in common.

They find purpose in their social connections.

So, that is definitely a strong theme through all of these small, tight knit communities.

They also live closer to nature, and they spend their time in nature.

So there’s a health benefit from surrounding themselves with nature and all the lifestyle choices that come with that.

P: Yeah.

M: So that ties closely to exercise like we’re talking about.

P: Yep.

M: Also, most people living in blue zones enjoy physical activity and incorporate that naturally into their daily lives.

P: Yes.

M: So, they do a lot more gardening and walking.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: They spend a lot more time running around after their grandchildren and volunteering.

P: Mmm.

M: They also have a slower pace of life, so a bit less stress as well, and finally back to what we’ve been talking about. Their diet is characterised by moderate caloric intake.

P: And mostly plant-based sources, I can see as well.

M: Yes. Yes so vegans rejoice.

P: Laugh!

M: So these are small communities where Maccas hasn’t moved in, right?

P: Yeah, there’s more information I’ve got on that. So, Adam Drewnowski, in a 2009 study, talks about the existence of food deserts in areas of America.

M: Yes!

P: And this is where fast food outlets actually outnumber grocery stores. And this comes back to social determinants of health and having access to that dietary area. So the location where you live, if you live in one of these food deserts, it’s much harder for you to get access to fresh fruit and veg to the point of like 200 kilometres.

M: Yep.

P: You have to travel that far to get to a grocery store.

M: Because they’ve only got a 7/11, and any time they put fresh fruit and veg in there –

P: it’s gone.

M: No, it goes off.

P: Oh!

M: They’re not selling it enough, so they don’t sell it.

P: Yep.

M: It’s a, it’s a cycle, right?

P: Mmm.

M: There’s a couple of other things that I think are fascinating when it comes to health and happiness and the other impacts. So, firstly, a lack of exercise has been shown to lead to psychological disorders as we’ve discussed, so:

  • Depression;
  • ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder);
  • ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder);

Which is interesting for a lot of kids nowadays who are developing ADHD and ADD.

P: Yes, true. Or being diagnosed with it.

M: Yeah. Also, increasing exercise reduces your chance of dementia by 50%.

P: Yeah, that’s huge.

M: Yeah, absolutely.

P: That’s a big figure.

M: And then Ronald Petersen, who is an American doctor, he said “regular physical exercise is probably the best means we have of preventing Alzheimer’s disease today, better than medications, better than intellectual activity and better than supplements and diet.”

P: Mmm, interesting.

M: Exercise.

P: Yep, so true. And if we sort of get that 15 minutes a day that is so recommended, it does, it makes such a difference to your well-being and to your perspective.

M: Yep.

P: Getting out. Out of the house, out of the room that you’re in. I rode my bike for the first time in weeks today and I was like ‘Oh, yeah, I remember why this is good for me.’ Get’s you breathing. It gets all the systems moving through. And that has huge effects on your endocrine activity and your hormonal balances that ruled your system.

M: Absolutely. All right, Well, we have definitely shown that being happier makes you healthier. And being healthier makes you happier.

P: Laugh! Flip the switch.

M: Absolutely, thanks for joining us this week and we’ll see you next time.

P: Choose happiness.

[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.

[Exit music fadeout]

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Are You Getting Enough Sleep? (E54)

by

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete talk about how sleep affects your health and happiness. So, are you getting enough sleep?

Transcript

[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]

P: Oh… We’re on? [Silly voice] Are we good to go? He he. Am I on? Hello?

M & P: Laughter.

M: You are on.

P: I shouldn’t be on, we should be sleeping. We need more sleep.

M: We do need more sleep.

P: Apparently we’re not sleeping enough.

M: Actually, I’m really good at sleep.

P: Laugh.

M: Ask anybody.

P: Me too. I don’t sleep [the same as] with everyone’s sleep patterns, but I like my sleep.

M: I love my sleep.

P: Laugh.

M: And I protect it and guard it. Obviously this is the one thing I’m not failing at in my life.

P: Laugh. Exhibit.

M: Absolutely. So why do we need more sleep, Pete?

P: Our sleep is so good for us. There’s so much that sleep does for us. It’s basically influences our physical and mental capacity and every aspect of our life. So if you’re not getting sleep, things don’t happen! Laugh.

M: Absolutely. And we’re increasingly not getting enough sleep.

P: We are, in the 1940’s, eight hours of sleep was the normal arrangement of sleep, and we were pretty good at getting that amount of sleep. That was the average amount that most Americans and Australians were getting. But in the contemporary 21st century, we’re getting less and less.

In 2016, 30% of U.S. citizens were not getting seven hours of sleep. And in Australia, according to a health line survey conducted in March 2019 32% of Australians are also not getting seven hours of sleep. So we’re losing, at least one hour there.

M: And there’s been over the last 10/20 years a whole lot of books by quacks, complete quacks that say you can operate on four hours or five hours a night.

P: No. It’s bullshit.

M: It is.

P: Do not believe it people. Laugh.

M: Just like the dieting fads, these sleep fads are really harmful for you.

P: Yep, they are.

M: And not only that, yet again, you will die!

P: Yeah, laugh. Pretty much and it won’t be pretty. There’s a, there’s a direct link between cardiovascular health and sleep, diabetes, pretension, asthma, flues and colds, cancers, heart attacks.

M: Heart attacks in women in particular and more weight issues, which then leads to diabetes.

P: That’s a pre morbidity indicator.

M: Yeah, absolutely. You get more cravings of sugars and fats because your energy levels drop if you’re not getting enough sleep. So what does your body do when it’s low on energy?

P: Go get more fuel.

M: Exactly, it craves all those bad foods.

M: Yes.

P: The sugars.

M: So if you are obese. One of the first things you should be looking at if you’re hoping to lose weight is your sleep.

P: Mmm. Make sure you get enough sleep.

M: Yep.

P: And that means eight hours, not seven.

M: For adults.

P: Yes.

M: And it is more for teenagers and more for children and even more for babies. And here’s the really scary thing, we’re not even letting our infants get the recommended amount of sleep a lot of the time.

P: Oh really?

M: Yes.

P: Oh, Ok.

M: So you would never, never, if you were told how much sleep your baby should get, want to deprive that child of sleep.

P: Very true.

M: Why do you do it to yourself? This is yet another example of where we’re so much harder on ourselves than we are on other people.

P: Yes.

M: You’d never deny someone else they’re asleep that they say they need.

P: No.

M: Then we do it to ourselves all the time.

P: And another myth about sleeping is, it’s not a bank.

M: Yeah.

P If you miss out on sleep. You can’t make it up by having a big sleep. That doesn’t work that way.

M: No, not at all.

P: So that myth debunked, laugh!

M: It’s a debunking episode today isn’t it?

P: Laugh.

M: The other thing is, it makes you look old. It’s like smoking or getting out in the sun. So, you know, you get the bags under your eyes it’s really bad for your skin.

P: Your cells don’t regenerate as much.

M: Yep.

P: Not getting enough sleep has a huge effect on our cellular damage and our organs. The ability for our organs to regenerate.

Dr. Pam Taub of the UC San Diego School of Medicine talks a lot about this. She’s been doing a lot of work with firefighters and people on shift work and working around why they are so prone to cardiovascular disease and cancer due to the disruption of their circadian rhythms and the interruption of natural sleeping patterns.

M: So moving toward 24/7 world is going to kill us.

P: And that’s one of things that has killed us, and that’s one of the big shifting factors is in the post industrialised era we have more ready access to food, and we are eating much longer during the day. Our ancestors used to eat when the sun was up. We’re now eating well into the evening and we’re eating first thing when we get up, we get up at six, we get a coffee, we grab some breakfast and then we go to the gym and then we’ll go to the work and we’ll have something at 11 o’clock so we’re eating for longer.

We’re not getting that downtime of 10 hours where we’re not putting food in our stomachs. That’s upsetting our circadian rhythms. And that, in turn, upsets our sleep patterns.

M: Mmm.

P: It’s one of the big indicators that I found in some of the reading that I’ve done and the other, the other issue that comes around with that is our access to light.

M: Yes.

P: And the fact that there’s light pollution. Professor Ian Hickey of the University of Sydney is a big critic of light pollution and its links to bipolar and mood disorders.

M: Interesting.

P: And he talks [about] cognitive disorders being much larger amongst the teenage population because of our addiction to devices. Kids are going to their rooms and they have their iPad and they have their phone and they’re staying up until two o’clock in the morning on Facebook, watching YouTube and things like that. That’s having a major issue and damaging effect to our brain retention and mood cognition. And he says that’s a big one for getting rid of the issues that make us not get enough sleep.

M: I have to say it is one of our ongoing marital arguments.

P: Aaahh.

M: That Francis and I have.

P: Laugh! I’m going to go out on a limb here, are you the one on the devices or is Francis?

M: No, no, no. Not devices, light. In the bedroom.

P: Oh, yes. Right.

M: So he wants absolute pitch black or he says he can’t sleep, whereas I want to wake naturally with light rather than in a pitch black room and I can’t tell whether it’s eight AM or two AM and wake to a blaring alarm in a pitch black room.

P: Yes.

M: That to me just gets me up and in the wrong frame of mind and, and often times waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle rather than coming out of a sleep cycle and waking naturally.

P: Yeah.

M: So there’s no, there’s no solution, for the two of us, right?

P: I’m on your bank there Marie, because the fact that sunlight coming in stimulates our body into melanin production and all those, those responses that need to happen it’s a, I’m a big one for waking up with the sunshine.

M: Yes. So I think for the rest of my life that I live with Francis, for better or worse, we will be arguing over how much light is in our room when we go to sleep in the evenings.

P: Laugh. Well, how much does light affect us? You’ve referenced a study in Germany here.

M: Oh, I love this study. I love all studies that I come across!

P: Laugh!

M: There’s something fascinating to me about studies in psychology. Most of them, some of them are just dry as anything and so boring.

P: Yeah, laugh.

M: But so many of them are just super cool.

P: Where do these people come up with these ideas?

M: I know, they’re great!

P: Laugh.

M: And another area that you have to look into if you find this stuff as fascinating as me is behavioural economics because that is some really trippy stuff.

P: Wow, Okay.

M: Where you think that people would do… So It’s stuff like you put a marshmallow in front of a kid and you say, “if you wait five minutes and don’t eat it I’ll give you another one.”

P: Laugh.

M: And then walk away. And a lot of kids will just go ‘meh’ and eat the marshmallow when if they’d only waited five minutes they could have had two.

P: Two!

M: But that’s not how human behaviour works, right?

P: Laugh!

M: That’s the really simple behavioural economics, kind of.

P: In a nut shell.

M: Yep.

P: It’s a marshmallow.

M & P: Laughter.

M: But we do some really whack things, humans, that just go against our self-interest –

P: Laugh!

M: – all the time! Anyway.

P: Like not getting enough sleep, laugh.

M: Yep. Yes, laugh, back to what we were talking about.

P: Laugh. Reverse! Come on, reel it in!

M & P: Laughter!

M: So this study in the late sixties and early seventies in Germany, where they put a bunch of people into a bunker and they had no idea of the time. So, there was no natural light, no radios, no TVs, no clocks, nothing for weeks.

P: For weeks!?

M: For weeks!

P: Oh my god, those poor people.

M: And they watched. I think they just found a bunch of students, to be honest. They were happy to do some quiet study, laugh.

P: And get paid for you it.

M: And get paid, yeah. Which is, you know, pretty much every study is just students.

P & M: Laughter!

P: We know one of those, laugh.

M: Poor students.

P: Laugh, that’s why she can come to dinner every now and then.

M & P: Laughter.

M: So they then watched all of these people and saw how their bodies realigned to some kind of rhythm. And they did.

P: Mmm.

M: They reverted to their natural rhythm, so free from any external indicators of what they should be doing, their bodies went back to a natural rhythm of wakefulness and sleep.

P: Mmm.

M: Now there were, just as a side note, a few crazies out there who went to a 48 hour rhythm with their awake hours.

P: Oh, wow.

M: So this isn’t when we talk about “normal” I’ve got a quotes going for people at home.

P: Laugh.

M: And when we talk about “normal”, there are always exceptions. And there were in this study, some exceptions of people who went to a 48 hour body clock, and that was normal for them.

P: So did that mean that they were sleeping for longer periods and staying awake for longer periods?

M: Yes.

P: But their average amount of sleep across seven days would be the same as someone on a 24 hour cycle?

M: I didn’t look that closely, laugh.

P: Maybe you should see?

M: Ah, look at our show notes, I’ll see if I can find that, laugh. [Please see full study on sleep cycles here.]

P: All the reading of the research that I have done says that that would be the case, even though sleeping is not a bank. Like you can’t have one big, long sleep and make up your sleep. But you do need regular intervals of sleep/ wakefulness to keep those circadian rhythms happening.

M: And to do things like commit things to memory, long term memory.

P: Yes.

M: It’s so critical for making those connections and banking all of your data the end of the day.

P: Yeah.

M: I don’t think that, again I’ll have to look into it, but I highly doubt people are awake for 24 hours and then sleeping for a full 24 hours.

P: Yeah.

M: I’d say they’re probably at 36 of awake and then a good 12 hours sleep or something.

P: That would be interesting.

M: Or they may have been having naps throughout that time.

P: Ah, so does napping work?

M: Well, according to science, it does.

P: Okay.

M: Yep, but anyway, most people in the bunker study, the bunker sleep study, reverted to a 25 hour body clock.

P: Interesting.

M: So we’re an hour out from the day.

P: Mmm.

M: And I find that a little bit interesting. So when we’re out not in bunkers, laugh.

P: Laugh!

M: And have access to daylight to guide our activities. We, we go and follow and force our bodies to follow a 24 hour clock, generally with some small exceptions when we party too much at university and things like that.

P: Laugh.

M: But we force up what is into a 24 hour cycle. And that might actually be, not great for anyone, either.

P: I’m wondering if whether the weather, seasons, make a difference as well?

M: Mmm.

P: We tend sleep more during winter because it is darker.

M: Earlier, yep.

P: Whereas in summer, we’re out and we can’t sleep because it’s hot sometimes and the sun is up a lot longer, so again, that might be the 25 hour rhythm.

M: Well, remember when we were in Sweden?

P: Yeah, that was weird way absolutely.

M: And we came out of the restaurant and it was 11 o’clock at night and it was still light.

P & M: Laugh.

M: Yeah, and that really messed with us for a while. We were all so jet lagged, I would say.

P: Laugh. Well, it’s interesting you touched on the types of sleep because Dr Laura Jacobson, who’s the head of the Sleep and Cognition Laboratory of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, that’s a mouthful, –

M: Laugh.

P: – in Melbourne in Australia, she says that getting quality of sleep is important. Everyone talks about REM sleep and that REM sleep is so important for what we need.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: It is important for our invention and our problem-solving capability. I think it was Isaac Newton who said that his theories came to him in a dream. Composers talk about it all the time, ‘oh the melody came to me in a vision when I was asleep.’ And that’s because REM sleep accesses those inventive areas of our brain.

M: It makes, it allows you to make the connections between the different parts of your brain, and that is where you get true creativity. So, it’s when the math part of your brain talks to the psychology part of your brain, and you’d never put those two together. And that’s why some of the greatest inventions were from people who had broad education and understood a little bit about everything.

P: Yeah, ‘cause they could link things together.

M: They could make those links, and they guaranteed, would not have made those links without the freedom, free of devices and free of people to let their minds wander and make connections, but also without some really good sleep.

P: Yep, who was the apple on the head dude?

M: Newton.

P: Newton, him, Yeah!

M: Laugh.

P: Sitting under a tree, apple hits him on the head. ‘Ah, I’ve come up with the theory of…

M: Relativity.

P: I was thinking that.

M: No, gravity.

P: Right, relativity was Einstein. Oh, we’re going all over the place here, I need more sleep! Laugh!

M: Gravity.

P & M: Laugh!

P: But, getting back to Dr Jacobson, she also talks about the importance of non-REM sleep and that we equally need that because that’s good for our learning and our memory retention and organising our memories into long term memory and short term memory. So, which would explain why, if you’re not getting quality sleep, it’s constantly being broken, and you’re not getting that natural swing between REM and non-REM sleep. You’re befuddled the next day, you can’t recall things, you can’t remember what the article said that you were reading 5 minutes ago.

M: What the thing was?

P: The theory of relativity versus gravity?

M & P: Laugh!

M: You know that thing, dooby whacker.

P: Laugh. So students who are pulling all-nighters before exams. You’re doing yourself a disservice?

M: Well, it is important, you know, to say that you can sustain it for short amounts of time. So if you are pulling an all-nighter before an exam – Oh, sorry. If you’re pulling an all-nighter to get a paper in.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Then you can do that and not see the decline straight away. But the next day, after you’ve handed your paper in, you know, you’re going to feel it, right?

P: Yeah, you will feel it.

M: You’ll feel it.

P: This is what I’m finding with a lot of the research they’re saying, don’t fool yourself if you’re denying yourself sleep, it will hit you.

M: Absolutely.

P: There’s a there’s a compensation that has to happen. Same as if you’re going to not eat for 24 hours, you can’t go and exercise when you’re not eating.

M: Yep.

P: But you can, not eat for 24 hours and you won’t die. It’s actually good for you.

M: Ooohhh! In some situations.

P: Well, that another episode right there. We’re going to get side-tracked in a minute.

M: Uh, huh. You’ve got to be –

P: Laugh, I’m pro-fasting.

M: – really, you’ve got to be really careful. Fasting is not for everyone.

P: Yep, another episode.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Laugh.

M: So, back to napping though,

P: Yes.

M: There are definitely revitalising effects that come with napping.

P: Ok. ‘Cause I’m not a napper.

M: And – no me neither, I get really groggy.

P: I find it really frustrating.

M: Oh I can, I can, I just want a nap for three to four or five hours, laugh.

P: Which they say isn’t good for you.

M: Which means I can’t sleep at night.

P: Yeah.

M: So the ideal amount of time is about 90 minutes.

P: Oh, really?

M: But as short as 20.

P: Oh, Okay.

M: And here’s why a lot of people don’t do it because they can wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle and feel groggy and therefore not feel like they got any benefit from it there feeling worse than when they had when they went for the nap.

P: Right.

M: So the trick here is splashing water on your face and take a few steps to get your heart rate up again.

P: Ok.

M: And your brain will actually have had the benefits from that nap.

P: Oh.

M: So, it is worthwhile if you can get a nap in because you feel you need it.

P: Yep the power nap idea.

M: Always worthwhile to do it, even if you do wake yourself up in the middle of a sleep cycle, you’ve still let your brain have some downtime to recover, to put all those things into long term memory, etcetera, etcetera.

P: Yes, mmm.

M: So 20 to 90 minutes. And also, if you can’t do it during the day, which there’s no way I could fit a nap into my corporate life.

P: Laugh!

M: It’s just not happening.

P: Yep.

M: If you can’t do that, then a nap on the weekend is better than no nap. So if you only do a nap on Sundays.

P: A lot of people do that.

M: Yep. Do it.

P: Understood?

M: Absolutely.

P: So before we wrap up, how do we get better sleep if we’re not getting enough sleep?

M: There’s so many things that go into this.

P: Mmm. There are.

M: And, so many different things you should talk to your doctor about. And I’m gonna bring it back to me again.

P: Laugh.

M: Because it’s all about me, laugh. I suffered with bad sleep for a number of years because of my diet.

P: Ah, yes.

M: And it wasn’t because I was eating late. It was purely because I’ve had food allergies and intolerances for so many years, and it impacts my ability to sleep and stay asleep.

P: Understandable.

M: And everyone would tell me ‘you need more sleep’. And I was getting plenty of sleep. It wasn’t light, it wasn’t devices, it wasn’t all the usual things. So absolutely talk to your doctor of you having troubles with sleep because there are so many different things that can impact your sleep. But I think you’ve got three here, Pete, that we might end on that are the usual culprits, right?

P: Yes. So eating late, we’ve talked about it.

Don’t eat late.

Try to give yourself 10 hours without food, so don’t eat [late], especially don’t do what I do, which is a big meal before going to bed, it just keeps you up.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: I’m really bad at it because I finish work late. So don’t eat late.

Put down the devices, no light pollution.

Now that can also come down to keeping lights on in the bedroom, reading just before you go to bed. Which again I’m guilty of, having lots of light around you upsets your circadian rhythms and won’t allow you to rest.

M: Or having poor curtains or outside light.

P: Yep.

M: We have an apartment once that had a big spotlight.

P: Urrgghh.

M: And it used just come in out bedroom window.

P: That’s rough.

M: Most annoying thing in the world.

P: Yep, you want to get a BB-gun and take that thing out.

M & P: Laughter!

P: Last one.

Establish a routine that naturally brings you down.

P: So for me, one of the best things that I can do is to turn all my lights to really low and do some yoga. 20 minutes of yoga, not the big arches and the standing series, nice gentle on the floor, a couple of stretches with some soft music, if you need it, or no music at all. Decrease all the sensitivity of the sympathetic nervous system and naturally you’ll drift off to sleep really well.

M: I personally try to read for 10 minutes every night before bed, at least.

P: Which is fine because you’re resting and it’s fine to do that as long as you.

M: So no device and no white light

P: Yeah, no white light.

M: Definitely, come in here, turn the main lights off. Put the reading light on. Get into bed. 10 minutes often becomes 30 minutes or an hour but I’ll read and it’s –

P: – It’s your way to come down. It’s a good way to do it.

M: Yep.

P: Then you’re not like my mother with the woman’s weekly on your chest at 4am in the morning with glasses on.

M: Laugh!

P: Such a funny sight. You walk past and you’re like ‘Yeah, that’s good.’

And on that happy image, get more sleep people, it’s important!

M: Good night.

[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.

[Exit music fadeout]

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The Secret to Surviving Isolation

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Who are the Ones Surviving the Corona-coaster of Emotions?

They’re out there… the resilient. The ones who are not only surviving but thriving during isolation. So, who are they and what can we learn from the people who are thriving during isolation?

For many of us, emotions are running high as people around Australia face a second lock-down and more forced isolation. This time around, it’s really dealt a blow to a lot of people’s psyches. We thought we were about to step off the Corona-coaster, it looked like it was rolling back to the start. We dared to hope. Despite all the ups and downs, the good times and the scary times, we made it through. But 2020 had other ideas. And instead, we’re all strapped in for a second ride that no one wanted to take. Here we go again.

Not only that, but the rhetoric has shifted recently too adding more stress and worry to our daily lives. It didn’t take long to move from an unprecedented unified front between State and Federal governments to the usual blame game. Media commentators and talk-back radio soon followed with far more negative talk and frustrations being vented this time around. People are mad and they’re not holding back this time.

It’s like everyone forgot to take their afternoon nap, and all that “community-first” good behaviour has gone out the window. Whereas before, everyone held their tongue, now they feel justified in having a tanty. And who can blame anyone? We’re all just tired and fed-up.

The Resilient

Yet despite it all, there are some, a special few, who are doing just fine. For them, this is just another day in 2020, filled with hope and promise. They haven’t had bad days or bad weeks. They haven’t felt periods of mild depression or moments of anger and tears. In fact, rather than feeling an increase in anxiety or loneliness, they’re feeling more grateful, more positive and more satisfied with their lives. They’re happy.

These are the resilient ones.

It’s not that the resilient don’t feel any frustration, worry, anxiety or any of the other negative emotions that are completely normal in the midst of a global pandemic (what’s normal in this situation anyway!?). No. It’s just that these resilient people have found a way to power through with barely a bump on their emotional rollercoaster, and certainly not the 90-degree climbs and falls everyone else is experiencing.

So, what are these people doing differently to the rest of us? What’s the secret?

Who are the Ones Surviving and Thriving in Isolation?

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab have been looking into who is fairing best during these unprecedented times.

In their research, they found a group of people who are coping better than most, and even better, they’ve worked out what activities these people do to help them be positive and resilient. It’s worth mentioning again that these people aren’t perfect, they feel negative emotions too, they’re just not paralysed by their emotions and they bounce back faster.

The Secret to Surviving Isolation

So, what are the commonalities among this group of resilient people? What are the things they’re doing that lead to these positive emotions and keep the negative ones at bay?

The research shows that exercise, hobbies and self-care activities like meditation, kindness, gratitude and prayer are among the most common ways to maintain resilience during COVID.

“So the more stressed, anxious, lonely or depressed you are, the more it matters that you take time to exercise and care for yourself. We have found it useful to put repeating events in our calendars. That way, we’ve always got blocks of time dedicated to these things, and also reminders,” say researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Michael M. Prinzing.

On the flip side, the one thing that hurts your resiliency: scrolling through social media. The researchers showed that passively browsing and scrolling through social media is one of the worst things you can do – I’m sure in part due to all that negativity that we mentioned earlier.

Lastly, the research showed that people who spend more time actively interacting with others experience more positive and fewer negative emotions. So, doing the activities with someone is a double whammy. Or, if you can’t (isolation means isolation after all) then make sure you’re proactively making time to speak to people on the phone or on video chat. Text messages just won’t cut it.

Related reading:

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9 Small Ways To Add Exercise Into Your Day Without Exercising

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The health benefits of regular exercise are numerous, from boosting your immune system, improving sleep and boosting your mood, to reducing cardio-vascular diseases and even reducing the effects of ageing!

Yet, in today’s busy world, it can be hard to find the time to exercise. Sometimes we have good intentions, but with competing priorities, exercise just keeps getting cut, week after week.

Going to the gym or playing sports means finding time in a busy schedule to get changed, get there and back, take another shower and change again. Who has all that extra time in a day?!

Plus, for many people, it’s all just a bit daunting and not easy to get started. To be honest, a lot of people just don’t really like exercising in the first place.

“Don’t worry. Burpees don’t like you either.”

So, how can you reap the benefits of exercise without adding more stress to your week? In short, how can you exercise without exercising?

Here are 9 ways to add more exercise into your day without exercising

  1. Get off one stop before your train/bus stop and walk a little bit further.
  2. Park at the back of the car park when you go shopping.
  3. Take the stairs at work, or in your apartment (or friend’s apartment).
  4. If you sit at a desk for most of the day, try standing for all your meetings.
  5. Walk to your local shops instead of driving and carry the groceries back.
  6. Help others. Why not volunteer somewhere that you might have to stand a lot, such as a local pound or Salvation Army retail store.
  7. Offer to walk and play with your friends’ dogs for them. Take them to the park, throw a ball and have some fun.
  8. Go out for lunch. Walk to your favourite café or food court. Even better if you put on comfy shoes and power walk!
  9. Make it a point to vacuum, sweep or mop more often.

Remember that every minute of intentional movement adds up!

Related content: Read Moving On article The ‘No Excuses’ Beginners Exercise Plan

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Exercise Makes You Happy (E13)

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Happiness for Cynics podcast – episode 13

In episode 13, Pete and Marie discuss the science behind why exercise makes you happy and some recent studies about the benefits of exercise. They also offer a range of tips to help with motivation and to get some exercise into your life if you’re on lock-down.

Things we Talked About on This Episode

In case you also wanted to mental image of Aerobics Oz Style 🙂

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics. I’m Marie Skelton. I’m a writer and speaker focused on change and resilience. My co-host is Peter.

P: Hi there. I’m Peter I’m an isolated touch person. I’m an organiser of delayed jobs and a watcher of morning television… right now. Each week, we bring you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: And you can send us ideas for people to interview or topics to cover. Or just tell us we’re wrong by going to marieskelton.com/podcast. Also on that…

P: If you’re going to tell Marie she’s wrong, get ready! Get ready for an argument.

M: We welcome being corrected when we’ve made mistakes, Peter! So, so on that site are a whole lot of articles, resources and research and some really practical tips for bringing joy and happiness to your life. So onto today episode, which is all about exercise.

[happy music]

P: I don’t know why, but now I have Aerobics Oz Style running through my head.

M: Haha, Love it.

P: All those women in tight leotards and the strength from the 1980s.

M: We’ll have to put that up on the site so people can look on. And have a laugh actually, which is why we’re here, isn’t it? Alright. So today we’re talking about exercise and its impact on health and happiness. When I say health I mean mental health. There’s a whole lot of research into the physiological and physical health benefits of exercise, but we’re going to focus on how it can make us happier.

P: We all know exercising is great for our mood and everything, but what about our wellbeing in our mental state? According to science, that is, I was actually quite impressed with some of the research that was going on here and some of my ideas that I always held to be true were kind of challenged, which is kind of a nice point about going in and looking at science, because it’s all about the science, isn’t it Marie? We don’t just go believing

M: Of course, and we are here to break down mental barriers and limiting beliefs and all those things that our parents and grandparents instilled in us, and society instilled in us. And there’s one in particular that I’m really excited to talk about today, and it is this assumption that exercise is a burden to bear, and I think unless you were in the 15 or 10% of people who were naturally athletic and were picked on the school teams first and all the rest of it. It really has been a challenge to enjoy exercise for a lot of people. So, I want to go…

P: True I deal with this a lot with my client base.  

M: So I really want to go through a lot of science. I’m excited to talk through that, but also, I really want to challenge us to start thinking about exercise in a very different way. And hopefully the science will help people to reframe it in their minds. So another reason that I’m very excited to be talking about exercise at the moment, apart from being one of those people that has just naturally being a bit of an athlete, in my life, is that it’s so relevant for us being stuck at home at the moment.

There is also a huge danger right now with a lot of people, firstly all of a sudden losing all incidental exercise. So, we’re no longer walking to the bus stop and then walking to the office, and going downstairs for a coffee, and running up the road to pick up some groceries and getting lunch at the cafe, all of that incidental walking and movement is now pretty much gone. I know I walk about six steps to get from my desk to the bathroom and about 10 steps to get to the kitchen nowadays. So just the little movement that all adds up is absent from a lot of people’s days now and then. Secondly, the bigger exercise routines just completely destroyed. Gyms are closed, sports teams aren’t playing at the moment, so I think, focusing on exercises topical at the moment. So, let’s look at the science Pete, I’m going to throw to you. Tell me the science!

P: Oh, wow, look at me getting all scientific! I’m going to start off from the Latin “Mens sana in corpore sano”, a sound mind is a sound body. So, there’s always been the link between mental health and exercise and movement right through the ages. exercise has a link to a mental wellbeing. Primarily through neurotransmitters. The big street dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. They’re the happy drugs. They’re the things that make us feel joyful. They are present when we exercise, and they increase in their production when we move our bodies and we do exercise. So, the other thing that these neurotransmitters do is that they block pain. The neurotransmitters when they’re present in the synapse, which is the gap between the different nerve endings that forms the connection’s back to the brain. When those three big neurotransmitters are in a lot of amount, in that synapse, it blocks the pain signal from reaching the brain. So, we effectively don’t feel pain…

M: while we’re doing exercise?

P: whilst and for a certain period of time afterwards. Because those neurotransmitters are present in the nerve synapse for a period after we finish exercise as well. So that joy of actually moving in exercising does las after you finished the actual activity, you get that lovely flush of going. I feel great, which usually means that you move a little bit more, which then creates more neurotransmitters, so it’s a self-sustaining cycle.

M: Nice. So, apart from it, making you feel good. It also stops you from feeling bad, which I think is really interesting. There is a study that I did want to talk about on the topic of depression and really interesting, because it came from our very own Black Dog Institute here in Australia when they collaborated with universities and health institutes from the UK, Australia and Norway. They did a study on about 34,000 Norwegian adults who will followed over a period of 11 years.

M: Now, as far as studies go, that is huge, right? 11 years, 34,000 people. And the great news out of that study was that they found that as little as one hour of exercise each week, regardless of intensity, helps to prevent depression. You only need a very little amount of exercise, and it can have really positive benefits. So, not only are you getting all of the wonderful natural chemicals flowing through your body, but also if you’re prone to depression or in situations that might lead you to depression, a little bit of exercise can help you to avoid falling down that path.

P: Well, it’s interesting because I’ve always intrinsically known this. I’ve always known that moving around getting out into the sunshine or doing an activity helps with your feelings of anxiety and stress. It was very interesting for me going into the research of it and seeing exactly why, in the study that Samuel Harvey talks about with the Black Dog Institute is that people who have not exercised at all – so sedentary individuals – if they do that 1 to 2 hours, they have a huge exponential increase in wellbeing. What we know is if you move, if you’re active, it helps.

M: Absolutely. And there’s more intricacies when it comes to intensity, isn’t there Pete?

P: Definitely. And this is something that I want to mention. University of Connecticut talks about the research that they took on with the benefits of moderate exercise versus intensity of exercise. Again, taking athletes as opposed to sedentary people. If you’re a huge exercise, vigorous activity person and you’re going out there and your go-to mechanism of dealing with issues off stress or anxiety is to go and hit it hard in the gym, you may actually be doing yourself a disservice. So, you’ve gotta watch that in terms of what sort of personality that you are. If you’re a person that site on the couch all day, get up and go for a walk. That moderate level of exercise has huge benefits for you. If you’re high level athlete and you want to go out and smash yourself on the track, you’re actually better off taking the pedal off and going for a walk in the forest, because it’s that moderate exercise that has more the benefit for your wellbeing in that activation of those happy neurotransmitters rather than introducing other elements such as cortisol into your system, which only creates more adrenal response, and that can create even more the high levels of anxiety.

M: So I think it is worth pointing out. You mentioned depression and anxiety. But there is a bit of contention about anxiety

P: There is, and there is a lot of talk about whether these findings relate to pre and post depression, as opposed to anxiety and what I have gained from the research is that the anxiety levels are unnecessarily affected by this moderate exercise.

M: Yes, it’s also worth pointing out that it was one of the big things when I was reading through all the research that I was keen to understand. Looking at causation and cause and effect, the studies looked at that cause and effect to make sure that happy people don’t just exercise more rather than exercise being the cause of people becoming happier.

P: Absolutely. Yeah, for those of further, it is actually the Hunt Cohort study of October 2017. Samuel B. Harvey in the American Journal of Psychiatry. One of their conclusions that they give and I’m going to read this out quoted it, is that “Given that the intensity of exercise does not appear to be important, it may be that the most effective public health measures are those that encourage and facilitate increased levels of everyday activities, such as walking or cycling. The results presented in this study provide a strong argument in favour of further exploration of exercise as a strategy for the prevention of depression.”

So again, it’s just reinforcing that gentle exercise, walking, cycling, going forest bathing — which is a thing – these are good things that can really help in terms of accessing that wellbeing aspect, and that feel good experience.

M: Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t necessarily track with the physical sciences, which say that high intensity is better for you from a cardio point of view. But if we’re talking mental health, then absolutely the science is showing to be pretty clear on this. All right, so, back to what we’re talking about at the beginning here. So exercise, definitely a law research shows that it has positive mental outcomes, and our listeners and ourselves at the moment are all in this high risk situation of not only not doing enough exercise but actually doing far less exercise and potentially not really knowing how to fix that. So I know for me when I am into week four of self-isolating and my first week was a shocker. So, for me, I normally, my routine in the mornings, I sit down and do some writing. Then I get myself ready for work, and I’ve got a good 30-minute walk through the city to get to my office. And then in the evenings, I’ve got volleyball, or I’ve got a regular gym routine as well, and all of that stopped. And so the first week, I got up and did my writing. And then I just switched laptops. I moved my personal laptop over and brought work laptop in front of me on. I worked on. I got up to pee, and I went to the kitchen at lunch. Apart from that, I turned around and I’d done 12 hours of sitting and again it’s at a laptop, not in front of a screen, so my neck and my shoulders were tight and tense, and I did that for five days straight. But I have become far more aware of that really bad behaviour. They say that sitting for prolonged periods of times is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes. That’s how bad it is for you.

P: I feel like I’m on rote here. Because this is a conversation I have very often with so many of my clients and trying to get some office workers to do the most basic movement patterns outside of sitting at the desk top from getting on the bus and going in the car. It’s like pulling teeth sometimes. So my clients, you know who you are. I’m talking to you. Points coming out… right… Schedule it, make a schedule, make a plan, get in your diary and put down an hour. Put it aside where you’re going to do some movement doesn’t have to be big movement. It doesn’t have to be going to the gym. It could be playing with the dog and the kids, getting on the jungle gym and going for a couple of swings on the trapeze. That’s movement. It’s exercise, so it’s really important to schedule that in and keep to it. Make sure that nothing interrupts that time. If Grandma calls, tell her to hang up and call you back later. That’s your time. It’s your time to move. The other thing is making it accessible. Have it near you? If you’re going to do something, it’s no good if it’s 30 minutes away, because it’s too easy for you to go “Oh, it’s too hard to get there.” Make sure you have it close to you. And if that means it’s close to work or it’s close to home where you spend most of your day, it’s got to be accessible on. That’s a really important tip for making sure that you keep to your schedule. Prepare pack your God damn gym bag. Take it with you. Put a talent, put a put a snack and put a chocolate bar in that you’re going to give to yourself that the end of your 20 minute run. If that’s what you need to motivate yourself. If it’s a cherry ripe, have a few cares as long as you’re preparing yourself because that’s setting up process and it’s setting up routine on you’ll be thinking of that chocolate bar all the way throughout the day gone, I’m going to have a Cherry Ripe at the end of my 20-minute run. It’s going to motivate you

M: I love Cheery Ripes!

P: There you go. You can see that reaction is what we’re after.

M: It’s… by the way, it’s an Australian treat that no one else around the world actually even likes, like musk sticks… very Australian. We grew up on them as kids. And Americans if you feed them musk sticks, they think we’re weird. They taste like chalk to them

P: Bahahaa

M: Complete side bar, by the way. So, let’s get back away from treats and back to exercise.

P: Oh, now I feel like Iced Vovos and a cup of tea. [laughs] Make it social! Which is really hard at the moment because we’re not allowed to make its social, and I think this is one of the big impacts that we’re experiencing.

M: No, I call … not B-S… but I have a solution. I have a colleague of mine who is zooming their exercise, so she does exercise with a group of friends at the gym normally, and now they’re zooming. So they’re doing zoom exercise sessions, and it’s actually making them a bit more connected, and it’s holding them to account to actually do it.

P: That’s my whole point is if you can use what you can to make it social, so even if we’re not in the same location. Setting each other goals is another good one. So I’m going to say to Marie, right, we’re going to 100 push ups. I’m going to post my 100 push ups on Facebook Messenger with you on, that’s going to pressure you to match me for those 100 push ups. So that’s another way of sharing the load or making a social, make it again competition.

M: Peeeete! That was my tip. That’s in my column.

P: Oh, did I steal from you? My bad oh dear.

M: Yeah yeah yeah, like you care.

P; So sad. Hahaha

M: OK OK. What else have you got? Then it’s my turn.

P: No, no, no I’ll throw to you here, Marie, I’ll let you take over from there. I did want to say that you know, self help gurus, motivational coaches all support that when we’re mentally exhausted, were stressed or fatigue, one of the best things that you could do is change your physical state. And if that means getting up, putting on a sarong and a hula hoop and dancing around to Kylie Minogue in your underwear, I say, go for it.

M: Haha, of course, you do. So, moving onto my tips. I did want to mention make it a goal, so it is really hard at times to motivate yourself to get up and do what you know you should do. But if you’ve got a holiday that you want to go on, if you want to go climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa or you will not go hike Machu Picchu, you picture there’s a great types of goals or, you know, why not Everest? You know, shoot for the moon, right? But it takes discipline and dedication to being fit and building your strength and resilience to get to that point. And they’re great goals to have. So they’re even better than just a bit of competitiveness between friends. If that’s what motivates you, that that’s what motivates you. Secondly, I think going back to what was saying at the beginning of the episode, I really would love people to change their mindset about exercise from it being a chore to being a form of self-care a year.

If you take the time to put on makeup before you go to work, or to get your hair coloured and cut, or just cut, or to iron your shirt or have a bath every now and then, or you spoil yourself with a glass of wine, you should be spoiling yourself with exercise. Yeah, and if we can start to shift mindsets, we might start to make a dent in this obesity epidemic that we’re seeing sweep the world as well. The great thing

P: I support your viewpoint, making it, making it fun. Finding something that you enjoy is one of the big things that my clients about it. So, I’m not going to make you run five KMs if you hate running. Let’s find something you enjoy doing. I remember for one of my clients it was salsa dancing. That’s perfect, I said let’s send you to ballroom classes. Let’s find something local that’s got salsa and off she went, and she’s been doing it for a year and loves it right.

M: There is something out there for everyone. And that’s where I think a lot of us, were just burned by PE and by gyms, gyms are not for everyone. If you want to up your incidental exercise, you can try doing with a gardening if you’ve got a backyard, maybe starting your days with a bit of yoga. If you can put YouTube on your phone or on your TV in the morning and do a little bit of stretching and core work. That’s a great way to start your day and something that I’ve been doing it at lunch times is a short, sharp, 20-minute high intensity interval training. So “hiit” work out. So you can get a really good hard work out in before you your lunch. And then the last thing, I want to leave you with is that one of the things to remember is that going for walk counts as exercise. It’s also free doesn’t require special equipment. You can do it with a friend. And also, there’s additional research out there about the positive psychological benefits of being outdoors. So, you can kill three positive psychological birds with one stone. You get the social element, the exercise element and the outdoors element.

So that’s all I wanted to leave you with today. Thank you for joining us, and if you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast, or even better, share it with your friends.

30-Day Happiness Challenge

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How to Rewire Your Brain to Bring More Happiness Into Your Life

We’re all living through unique and challenging times right now. To make matters worse, a lot of our stresses are completely out of our control.

But there are certain things that are 100 per cent within your control and you can do to build your resiliency and happiness.

Follow the 30-day Happiness Challenge and Rewire Your Brain to Bring More Happiness Into Your Life!

The challenge is divided into activities under the three resiliency and happiness foundations: purpose, social connection and healthy mind and body. If any activity doesn’t speak to you, try to replace it with a similar activity that motivated you.

Before you get started:

  • You’ve got to be all in! It’s only 30 days, and what if it works? Go on, commit and see where it will take you.
  • Prepare to set aside time each day to complete your activity in a mindful, distraction-free way.
  • Plan ahead. Take a look at the activities for the upcoming week so you can plan anything that needs planning. Set things up in your diary early to lock it in.
  • Do it with a friend! Find a friend to complete the challenge with, and you can hold each other accountable.
  • Need inspiration? Click on the links if you want more help, ideas or explanations.

Start the 30-day Happiness Challenge now!

Day 1 – Plan a dinner date with a friend or loved one

Day 2 – No sugar day

Day 3 – Start a gratitude journal

Day 4 – Set aside time to find flow

Day 5 – Call your Mum or a sibling for a chat

Day 6 – Go for a 30-minute walk with a friend or family

Day 7 – Rest and relax

Day 8 – Learn something new – try a podcast, book or Ted Talk

Day 9 – Organise a dinner party

Day 10 – Drink 8 glasses of water

Day 11 – Write in your gratitude journal

Day 12 – Bring awe into your life

Day 13 – Hug a pet, partner or friend

Day 14 – Go to bed 1 hour earlier

Day 15 – Sit outside in nature for 30 minutes

Day 16 – Write in your gratitude journal

Day 17 – Practice kindness or help a friend or neighbour

Day 18 – Get 30+ minutes of exercise

Day 19 – Write in your gratitude journal

Day 20 – Set aside time to find flow

Day 21 – Grab a drink or meal with a work colleague

Day 22 – No processed foods, only fresh foods

Day 23 – Take a social media detox. Turn off all notifications.

Day 24 – Learn something new – try a podcast, book or Ted Talk

Day 25 – Plan your next holiday with family or a friend

Day 26 – Do 30-minutes of stretching

Day 27 – Write in your gratitude journal

Day 28 – Practice positive solitude

Day 29 – Practice kindness or help a friend or neighbour

Day 30 – Go for a 30-minute walk with a friend or family

Follow our 30-day happiness challenge to bring more happiness into your life today!

Tell us in the comments what activities do you do that help you to bring happiness into your life!

Don’t forget to subscribe for our monthly newsletter for more tips, freebies and subscriber only content!

The Secret to Living Longer

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Do you Want to Live a Long and Healthy Life?

Life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, and as a result the world’s population is aging. In fact, in the US alone more than 70,000 baby boomers expected to retire every single week until 2030!

Since we haven’t worked out how to stop time yet, living longer is great news for all of us, but unfortunately it doesn’t follow that we’ll all be healthy and have good quality of life as we age.

In fact, along with the increase in the aging population, we’re also seeing a rapid increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

However, a 20-year study of more than 111,000 people has found that a healthy lifestyle could increase your chances of living a healthy and longer life by up to ten years for women and seven years for men. The study looked at how people could live free of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.

The Secret to Living Longer

Previous studies have shown that smoking, inactivity, poor diet and heavy alcohol consumption contribute to up to 60 per cent of premature deaths and up to 18 years’ loss in life expectancy.

This latest study however assigned a ‘healthy lifestyle score’ based on five lifestyle factors—diet, smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and body mass index (BMI). The good news is that you can influence these five lifestyle factors to increase your chances of living a healthy and long life. The more you are better at maintaining, the better your score.

  1. Healthy Diet: Eating a healthy diet means including a variety of food groups (to make sure you’re still getting all the nutrients and vitamins you need!), good portion control, eating plenty of fresh healthy foods instead of processed and packaged foods, limiting (or eliminating) unhealthy fats and sugar.
  2. Don’t Smoke or Quit Smoking: Obviously, it’s better if you’ve never smoked. But if you’re a smoker, the research also shows that quitting at any point in your life gives you a better shot and repairing the damage it’s done to you. So, the sooner you quit, the better.
  3. Do Regular Physical Activity: You should aim to do moderate to vigorous physical activity for more than 30 minutes a day. If you are not used to doing exercise, this can take some time to build up to. Check out the ‘No Excuses’ Beginners Exercise Plan to get yourself started.
  4. Limit Excessive Alcohol Consumption: It’s OK to have a glass of wine with dinner every now and then, but we’re talking about cutting out regular and excessive consumption here. For women, try to keep your consumption below 5-15 g/day and for men below 5-30 g/day.
  5. Maintain a Good BMI : Your BMI, or body mass index, is a measurement that is used to assess whether you are in a healthy weight range. Unfortunately, obesity is a major limit to life expectancy. If you follow a healthy diet and do regular exercise, this should be relatively easy to maintain (all other health considerations aside). You should aim to have a body mass index of between 18.5-24.9. Check out the Heart Foundation’s BMI calculator to see where you measure up.

Living longer is only worth it if you can enjoy it! So set up some good habits and plan for health and balance in your life.

And remember, it’s OK to occasionally fall off the wagon, it happens to us all. Just remember to get up, dust yourself off, and get back on again (without any judgement)!


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Balancing Work Pressures With Health and Fitness

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Dade Bailey, corporate leader and personal trainer, talks about the importance of balancing work and health

We all know we need to do exercise. There have been hundreds, probably thousands, of studies into the positive effects of regular exercise. It leads to better moods, decreased stress, more mental resilience, more confidence, more energy, and I could keep going on. So, there is no way I could have a site dedicated to happiness and mental health, and not cover exercise.

Unfortunately, when we get busy, exercise is often the first thing we drop!

That’s why this week I’m interviewing Dade Bailey, who has had a very successful career in the corporate world, but he also recently retrained as a personal trainer. I spoke to him about the importance of balancing the pressures of work with health and fitness, and how to bring a bit more balance into your life.

You’ve had a very successful career with some big Australian brands, but there’s more to you than your professional career… Let’s cut to the chase: you’re buff.

<Laughs> Nice, thanks. Yes I’m Okay. So yes, but it took a long time for me to get here.

How much time do you spend working out or doing exercise each week and what do you do?

On reflection looking back, I always wanted to get to this point of being able to look in the mirror and go, yeah, I look good. I feel great. I’ve got a healthy balance, and it took a very big mind shift to get there.

The gym I’ve been with for 14 years called Hiscoes in Surry Hills [Sydney], is such a great gym, I did a strength challenge with them that was the catalyst. They really gave me the understanding of how muscle groups work, how nutrition needs to work, how building good longevity strength really would help. And that helped me set my mindset to where I am now.

Now, I’m at the gym about four or five times a week for my own personal training. I do different things, that could be strength training, high intensity training, but also it could be just something for stress relief – like going to kick the crap out of a boxing bag, or just going to do some yoga for active recovery. I really love Pilates – Reformer Pilates – that’s really good. So, four to five times a week because rest is so important as well. You’ve got to be able to allow your body time to recover.

Is balance something that’s important to you?

I think being in the corporate world for such a long time, exercise is always my outlet and going to the gym in the morning sets me up for the day, to really start my day off well. So from a mental health point of view, it was like, I’m ready. I’m walking in the office ready to take on the day. I’m feeling good. I’ve got all these endorphins happening. It’s great. Fantastic.

However if my nutrition wasn’t balanced and I was then going to eat an egg and bacon sandwich every day, and not really balancing my food, I wasn’t really complimenting my training well. Then then looking at other parts of my life and ensuring I have a balance in those areas.

When I lead teams questions I’d ask ‘are you exercising? Are you eating right? Are you sleeping right? How’s home life?’ To see if their life is balanced, and if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be able to bring their best selves to work. At the start of each week, I used to ask my team “How are you feeling out of 10 this week?” To gauge how balanced they are heading into the week and how I could support them better.

Additionally I included exercise at work, instead of just having a 1:1 in a room, we’d go and have a walk and talk to do some exercise at the same time. Or have team meeting, we’d get out the building, so you were getting away from your desk.

Now I’ve become a personal trainer and I know a lot more about the sciences behind it, so going back into the corporate world is really going to help me as a leader to help my team thrive, so they get the best out of their work and bringing their best selves to work.

A lot of people join gyms and go to one or two classes and never go back. How did you find that spark or that passion to begin with?

As I said before there was a challenge at the gym. It was an eight-week strength challenge and I’m like, you know what, for eight weeks, I will commit. This is a short amount of time. Really commit. And even by week four of the eight weeks, I was seeing so many different changes in my body, how I was sleeping, how I was motivating myself. I changed myself from not being a morning person to being a morning person.

That’s huge!

It’s huge. I never used to be able to get out of bed. I used to sleep in and just go to work, but now I wake up at like 5:30 in the morning, quite happily.

Okay, I need your secret. We’ll get to that in a second.

But I think for me, it was that you’ve got to be able to help yourself and that was the mindset thing. You are the only one who’s going to be accountable here. You’ve got personal trainers that will help you, use them to help build out a program but it’s also “Where’s your commitment in this?” And I had to make a commitment to myself.

The corporate world is relentless, and it’s nonstop. And you have to find those moments to find that balance.

A lot of us are spending long, long hours in corporate world, and it’s becoming harder and harder to say no. What advice would you give to people to make sure they can find the balance in their life to fit in exercise.

Just from a personal point of view, after 14 years of working in an organization of the scale and the complexity that I did, I was really burnt out. And I’ve taken the time out to do some of the things I wanted to do, like become a personal trainer, which is amazing.

The corporate world is relentless, and it’s nonstop. And you have to find those moments to find that balance. As a leader in an organization, it was making sure that people came to work and they had a balanced life outside of work was my priority, because if they were wandering in and they didn’t have that balance, they weren’t able to perform at work. So for me, them making sure that they could do work flexibly if they wanted or being able to prioritize going to the gym classes that they wanted, or “hey, there’s a yoga class at four.” Go for it. You can. I know you’ll work to make up the hours. It’s about not putting restrictions on or being stuck in the old way of working of, “I need to see you at your desk from nine to five, and you need to produce X amount of widgets.”

Instead it’s like, “Here are the outcomes that you need to achieve. I expect you’re an adult and you’re able to achieve them. I will give you accountability to do that, and you work how you want. Giving people that freedom enabled them to be able to bring more of themselves to work and they were honest with me going, “I’m going through a tough time with this happening at home.” Okay, cool, at least I’m aware. But at least that kind of relationship really helped people bring everything they can to the office, and I created teams that thrive. And that’s where I’m always very proud of those moments. Because for me, if I’m running a team and they’re not living their best life outside of work, they’re not going to enjoy coming to work every day.

Absolutely. So obviously we all wish we had a boss like you! Were there any points in your life where you had bosses that didn’t subscribe to this idea? And how did you deal with explaining that you need to take time for yourself in order to be better for the organization or for your boss?

I had a boss who was a micromanager, and he really pushed my buttons. In the end, I learned that to manage the micro manager, I had to manage back. Okay, you want to know everything I’m doing? Here is a task list. Here’s everything I’m doing. You want to see that I’ve done all these tasks? Awesome.

Instead of them controlling me, I had to take control of them. But I also gave them honest feedback. I’d ask, “Can I just ask why you need to know this level of detail?” And sometimes people are just afraid of the boss. So just ask the question, “What was this to achieve? What’s the outcome?” Because for me, that kind of open and honest communication doesn’t happen enough in the corporate world. People need to ask the question “why” a lot more.

Have there been any times since you first started including exercise in your life on a regular basis that you haven’t been able to exercise, and have you noticed any impacts on your mental health or resiliency?

Absolutely. When in high delivery times, if I don’t get sleep and I don’t get to the gym in the morning, I go straight to work, I can sense my productivity levels dropping. I’m wandering in, I don’t feel energized, it would take me about two hours to get going. And people are bombarding me with questions and I wasn’t firing on all cylinders!

So that’s why it becomes so important to make sure you find that time and make sure that it happens, saying ‘this is important to my balance and the reason for that is to avoid two hours of wasted time as I wander in.’ Make sure you have the conversation as to why it’s important with your leaders to go, ‘this is me, this is why I need to do this. This is going to be better for you.’ This could be not just exercise, it could be making sure you’re dropping the kids off or going to swim class with the kids or prioritising a doctors appointment. As long as they let me know, there were ways we could make it work.

One time I noticed it started to affect my mental health was when I was leading the one of the biggest, complex change programs to deliver IT experiences to the whole organisation. It was consuming so much of my time, I started see my drinking habits go up each day, I was working longer hours, I was getting to bed late and sleeping in and not getting to the gym.

So I actually did a checkpoint, a kind of ‘put me at the centre’ activity and what actually makes me happy overall. For me it was flexible working, meaningful work, getting to the gym, making sure I’ve got time for my nutrition and making sure I’ve got time with my friends. When I started to protect those parts of my personal life, I felt the balance returning. I ensured I could cook on a Sunday night for the food for the week, ensured I limited my drinking to weekends, had conversation with my boss to come in a bit later so I could fit in my gym in the morning.  I really had to look at and put myself under the microscope and go, what makes you happy on a day to day basis from the outside of work. And what is work affecting of those pillars? And make changes.

I think it’s such an irony that when we’re needed most at work, we let down all the other areas of our life that keep us healthy for work.

But it’s also the ability for a leader to see that in their people. And for me now coming into a personal training side, I think I’m rounding out my skills in a very different way. Because it will be a very much, “well, what makes you ‘you’ outside of work? Is it exercise? Is it nutrition? How are you balancing yourself out? And how as a leader can I help that outside work operate well? What blockers do I need to remove to help free that up so you come into this office skipping?”

Can I ask you since you have been training and doing your certifications, what are some tips for people who are just starting out on their exercise journey?

Ask questions of anyone working in that gym. I’ve had the same personal trainer since day dot (Hi Mac) and he’s just so full of knowledge, like how bodies work, how you sleep, how exercise affects your energy levels – there’s so much knowledge that they have! Learn from them and really ask questions. They want to be asked and if you have a question over motivation, programs, technique or what is best to achieve your fitness goals, ask them. And if they don’t know they’ll know someone who can [help].

A lot of people don’t do the gym because they have a fear that they may look silly, don’t know how to  use the equipment or may go “ahh no, they look really fit, I can’t join that class.” But everybody working at the gym is there to help you. And yes, there are some people in gyms that are all there posing in front of mirrors or at the other end of the spectrum where they’re like, “Oh, my God, you had an alcoholic beverage, the world is ending.” But remember most people are there to better themselves. You’re all there for the same reasons, you’re there for health or want to look better for your wedding that’s coming up, or something like that. And there are people in that gym, with so many skills to help you achieve that. Don’t be afraid.

I know I was! I think I first went to a gym when I was 13 or 14 and those machines looked so scary. I don’t know if you remember going, “Oh my gosh, how do these work?” So would you recommend maybe taking a class to get started versus going straight for the weights equipment?

A couple of things that I’d recommend: most gyms overall should have some kind of introduction assessment. They should do a fitness assessment with you as soon as you walk in. Let’s sit down and get a baseline, let’s do some measurements. Let’s make sure you can know what your goals are, what do you want to achieve. A good gym will sit down and help you design a program and not only help you design a program to help you start to achieve that, but also show you how to use that equipment.

Regarding your point on the machines looking scary, they are built to help you ensure you’re doing your form correctly. Most should have a little illustration on them as how to use it properly, if you don’t have the confidence to talk to someone at the gym to demonstrate it to you. Otherwise, ask one of the trainers because they honestly want you to use the gym, use it safely, have correct form and they want their product to be used and for you to get the best results.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to add before we go?

I think in summary it’s about finding balance overall. If you are completing exercise or want to start, then work with your gym on how to do that and remember your body needs fuel for that exercise. Complement this with great nutrition, getting the sleep you need sleep, ensure you have time for your own mental health and having time for enjoying life – you need to look at what factors of your life are really are important to you, see how you get balance across them and see how you protect them.

After all, we work to live, not live to work!

If you’re in Sydney, you can find Dade at Hiscoes gym in Surry Hills. Visit www.hiscoes.com.au.

VIDEO: Weathering the Change Storm

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We’re all living in a Change Storm and experiencing more change, more often than ever before. It’s making us sick, with anxiety, stress and burnout.

In this video, I share some of the results of my research and the secret to why some people are resilient, while others are not. Learn about the three foundations to build your mental strength and resilience, so you can weather the Change Storm and cope with anything life throws at you.

See transcript below.

Want to know more? You can find out more about the Change Storm and how to build your resilience, or read about My story.

Dealing with the Change Storm

There are science-backed activities you can do to better manage your stress and build your resiliecy. Check out my posts under the below topics for some ideas on how to manage your stress, or speak to a professional.

Community and Connection: Connecting with others and contributing to your community are proven to build emotional resiliency and make your life happier. It is so important not to neglect this part of your life, especially if it doesn’t come easily, like when work is really busy or if you’re a natural introvert.

Health and Wellbeing: Your health and wellbeing is critical to your happiness. Luckily, there is a wealth of information about how to make small changes to your life to make it healthier and improve your wellbeing.

Meaning and Purpose: Having a sense of meaning and purpose in life is critical to resiliency and living a happy life. You need it to thrive and flourish. It’s about having a reason to get out of bed in the morning, setting goals and having commitments. Some lucky people get that purpose through their job, but many of us get our purpose through other activities such as volunteering, learning or experiencing new things or caring for others.

TRANSCRIPT: Weathering the Change Storm

Now, more than any other time in human history, we’re experiencing more change, more often than ever before. It’s a change storm. And it can feel like it’s raining down on us, and there’s hailstones pelting us. And there’s that sideways rain, and it’s even raining cats and dogs… and even men.

There is no escaping change today. So why are we so bad at coping with it? Now I’m no stranger to change. I come from an elite sports background, having played volleyball for Australia and on scholarship in the states college. I started my career as a journalist working with USA Today and then moving to large multinational organizations, where I coached senior executives.

But a couple of years ago, I was on holidays with a friend when I had a motorbike accident and I nearly died. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst part wasn’t being told I’d probably have to have my leg amputated.

And it wasn’t the three months in hospital, the 12 surgeries, the years of pain and rehab.

The worst part was a few months after the accident, shortly after I got home.

One day, I started crying. And I wheeled myself into my bedroom and put myself to bed and that’s where my husband found me when he got home from work that night. And that’s where I stayed crying for the next four days. It was the start of a very long journey to regain my mental health.

And when I got out of that dark space, I started talking to people who’d been through major life changes. And I went from feeling alone and confused about what I’d gone through to feeling indignant that so many people I spoke to had similar stories to mine. They had been through major change and they hadn’t coped.

So I ask you again, why are we not able to deal with this change when we all know it’s happening?

So being an ex journalist, I’ve spent the last few months talking to people around the world. I’ve spoken to Olympic athletes and their coaches, to former and current military personnel to people who’ve been made redundant and people who’ve retired, a second of people who’ve been given heartbreaking diagnoses and who’ve experienced trauma.

The great news is there are three foundations that people who cope with change well have.

Now this isn’t to say that those people don’t feel pain. When things go wrong, they still experience the stress of the situation. But they bounce back faster. And they don’t let it overwhelm them and lead them to depression. So I’m guessing you want to know what those three things are?

So firstly, they have purpose and meaning in their life. And for a lot of us, that means a job. But there is variety here. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s having goals and commitments.

The second thing is they’ve got strong social bonds. They’ve invested time into a core group of people that they feel like can depend on. They also often have a wider community of people around them due to things like church, sports groups, and volunteering activities.

The third thing these people have is that they practice and prioritize health and wellness habits. Now the habits themselves can vary between things like yoga, practicing gratitude and mindfulness, to hardcore gym junkies or simply eating healthfully and drinking water. But they prioritize those habits in their lives over the other things that get in the way of day to day life.

Now, you’re probably wondering what happened to me and how I got myself out of that mental health hole and to be honest, it was dumb luck. Two things happened around the same time.

Being an athlete, I was getting bored with my rehab, it was going a bit too slowly. And one day I rolled into my physio, and I said I’ve just booked my flights to Machu Picchu, we’ve got a year to get me there. And last October, I did hike Machu Picchu [applause]. But that gave me a goal gave me a purpose and it lit a fire.

The second thing that happened around the same time is a good friend of mine railroaded me into coaching Sydney’s LGBTQ first ever competitive volleyball club. And what I didn’t know at the time is that those crazy, loving, fabulous men would give me back my community and my social bonds that I’d lost when I’d come home from hospital all of a sudden. And I can’t thank them enough.

So if there’s two things that I want to leave you with today, firstly, if you’re going through change, please know that you’re not alone if you’re struggling.

Secondly, you will all go through change at some point in your future. So take stock of your life. Look at those three things — workaholics in particular — make sure there is balance and you’re investing in your social bonds and the people around you and that you’re taking time to look after yourself.

Thank you