More naps, less coffee: Norman Swan’s tips for the good life

When you hop on the internet looking for health advice, you often find conflicting information. One day coffee is good for you, the next day it's going to give you cancer. You should be adding more of this than you should be fasting longer. I mean, it could all get very confusing,

This interview, Norman was in about week ten or eleven of Sydney's lockdown, so I wanted to know what on earth was getting him through a.

Lot of denial.

What's getting be through lockdown is just creeping from day to day, moment to moment, hour to our task to task, and trying not to think too far ahead. I mean, I'm being paid to think far ahead, so people are asking me for my opinions all the time, so it's pretty hard to escape that. But in terms of my own world, I really have a near term focus.

How do your health retains change during lockdown?

Pre lockdown, pre New South Wales outbreak. I would go to the gym most days, and probably most days well, I prefer to go to the gym early evening, but I find that my daily schedule is so irregular that early evening often means I don't end up doing it, So I usually end up going to the gym first thing in the morning before work, so early at six am, sometimes five thirty am, and do the gym. Then I don't enjoy it as much, don't feel as good as it after it, but I need to get it done.

That sounds very nice. And what other health through teens change for you in terms of eating and drinking and like what you're consuming.

Well, I'm an overeater and with poor appetite control, and therefore it's a constant struggle for me to control eating. And when you're indoors all the time. I'll tell you in a nycdote that tells you everything, probably about me is I was once house hunting, went to see a house on display, or went to visit the house that was open for inspection, and the agent came up to me at one point and said excuse me. I was in the kitchen and I'd actually opened the fridge.

And was kid was casing.

Into the fridge, and I hadn't realized that actually doing that I was.

I was.

That wasn't during COVID. That was for covered with Glinton Went's eye. But I guess you were saying sort of thing. And so when I go to a party, and remember when used to go to parties and there's finger food, remember you know, I've actually got to engage about fifty percent of my brain in not picking up the finger food, and then I've only got fifty percent of my brain

So I'm cooking more elaborate meals.

Like a lot of people, I'm addicted to the New York Times cookbook or cooking website.

It's just really reliable. It's for busy people.

And if you want to roast a duck and roasted simply and it doesn't feel or turkey or things like that, they've just got all these recipes that work and so I've been doing much more cooking moites, not reverting to take away and.

What are some tricks or hacks that work for you in terms of not constantly using food as entertainment. I guess during lockdown because I can imagine that there are so many people that are struggling with that.

What works for you, well, what works for you doesn't necessarily apply to a lot of other people. So last year I wrote a book, So you think you know what's good for you? And that was occupational therapy, and that also provided so essentially I used work as a distraction.

Like today for example my diari.

Look it's about gaps, and then I'm booked up to do on air things and so that's unpredictable. But doing a book gave me that I knew I had to achieve a couple of thousand words a day. I set aside that time and sat down and there was nothing else there. My email went off, So it was almost importantly meditative doing that, and that's what brought me through. And I'm about to start a second book in the same vein. I'm thinking, well, work last year, hopefully will worked this year.

To ask with the book, which I must say I loved. It's quite a tomb of a book. It's like just over four hundred pages. I've got it here in front of me, and the reference list is mighty long. There's so much advice in the book and it's great and I want to know, like for you after you know, all these years of giving health advice and there's so much content in the book and so much advice, like, what are the top things that you really apply in your own world?

Well, the first thing, the first rule that you learn when you do mention is do as I say, but not as I do.

And whilst there's you know, the blurb on the book says you're a health guide, health advice that sort of.

Thing you won't actually find if you're looking for health advice, not by this book. It's really it's in your syncratic in the sense that I've always wanted to write a kind of antidote to health books, and because the thing that's missing.

From most books about health is.

Personal agency, so the recognizing that you're making decisions for yourself and your own circumstances.

You've got choices to make.

And often health books are really judgmental, and I just wanted to give non judgmental information. And you pick and choose, so you don't find very much advice in this, but you'll find issues dealt with that you've wondered about, in terms of nutrition, in terms of exercise, in terms of what's bullshit and what's not. And I try and call out bullshit, and it's up to you. I don't offer actually any advice. I just suggest here's the evidence. If you want to do X, you're not necessarily going to

For people that I guess, you know, they're in lockdown maybe or you know, if they're lucky, they're not in lockdown, but they're looking to I guess incorporate a couple of healthy habits into their daily routine, like what what are a couple that give you the biggest bang for your back if you.

Like well, I talked about the seven minute workout earlier there. When I'm talking about exercise routine. You don't actually have to exercise, Tomas. Only why you're exercising, you're excising to lose weight and intend your wait. You probably do need to do quite a lot each day, but if what you're wanting is aerobic fitness, then you can actually go for short spurts of exercise.

So I.

Like the New York Times seven minute workout, So it's very intense, it's short exercises, a remuscle group strengthens them and I probably and I do two different versions of it each day. So I'll do the general one and I'll do the abs or they are so that sort of thing, and fifteen minutes, if I haven't got much time, I'm done and dusted.

And feel really good.

So today it's a good example. Chooses are busy day, very very busy days for me, and I'm on air early morning, so I get up early and I do two seven minute sessions. Certain sessions and fifteen minutes later, I feel pretty good, and I feel tired and my muscles are sore. It can't beat exercise as being the medicine that you need to lift your mood to make you feel better and actually to have physical benefits during

Now, your workday is sound very full on, particularly with early starts, and then especially if at the other end of the day you're doing some kind of a TV spot. How do you manage your energy during the day aside from your exercise routine.

Well, that's a very good question, and it depends on how well I slept the night before. Often how I feel and whether I've started with exercise. So starting with exercise, intense exercise guess me through a lot of the day, to be honest, even if I've had not a very good night's sleep. So that's the first thing is exercise doesn't wear me out, doesn't tire me.

It actually invigorates me for the rest of the day. So a lot of people don't.

Do because they think we're going to be knackered, and in fact the opposite occurs. The second thing is I do use coffee, so I probably have two or three shots in the morning. Criticize me for that, but I do. That's probably more of our psychological series. If you're really tired, it doesn't help you because you've just got the sort of anxious kind of stimulation on top of the tiredness

I used to do it a lot.

I don't do it that much anymore, but I am known within the ABC as an Olympic napper.

That's great, and so why only five to ten minutes with the napping, So I.

Need I just I just think piece and quiet and shut my eyes and just get a restorative.

Nap, and I'm good.

And in fact, even if I were, even if I'm on holiday and I have an afternoon, an't not for very long or.

Not for half an hour. I just don't.

I don't find that. I just don't sleep very long during the day. But if I need to sleep, I'll get it. But it's short and I'm refreshing, so I'll just add something to the sleeping thing, because it's never just one thing. In order to get to sleep in a busy environment like an office, I practice a kind of mindfulness meditation.

It's very amateur mindfulness meditation.

It's not the sort of entering your mind and thinking through the things that come into your mind, which is more of the psychodynamic aspect of mindfulness, which helps your psychological well being. It's more focusing on a noise or a sound or a thing in the environment, and that's the only thing that you think about, and that sends me to sleep very quickly.

Now back to coffee, because I do remember when I read so you think you know what's good for you. You do describe your cat been intake, and do you love your coffee. But I'm intrigued by what you said that coffee won't help when you're really, really tired. So how can we use coffee strategically?

Yeah, I think that.

I think it's a mistake to think that you can use coffee terribly strategically, which is why I focus on ticket in the morning and I try not to have a coffee after about eleven o'clock in the morning, just because I don't want my evening sleep to be affected. And I find that even a coffee in the afternoon can stuff up my evening sleep, and I don't want that to be the case, so I don't I don't think that you if strategically you want to be awake and up, I think the nap is the better idea

Now, when I think about your schedule, like pre pandemic, I imagine it was very, very busy, But I can't even begin to imagine how many requests you would receive on your time and for your expertise every day, like since you know February March twenty twenty, and I want to know, like what's your process for deciding what to say yes to and what to say no to?

Like a lot of people, I'm bad at saying no, So with the media media requests, if it's internal to the ABC, I feel obliged to help and do something.

So most of my media are sorry, most of my.

Media things or booking not bookings. Most of the things I do on the media are within the ABC, So consider that part of my job and doing that. And I'll only say no if I've got something else on at the same time, or I'll say no if I don't know enough about it and I'm man follow myself, which I probably we can follow myself more often than I should do. But that's a fairly easy one. I get a lot of external requests, and sometimes it's somebody who's done me a favor and I return in the favor.

Something I mentioned before we started recording is that I'm a long term and very loyal listener of Corona Cast and your daily podcast, and I'm just like, I'm so impressed with how you just seem to know everything that's going on, Norman, in amongst your very busy, busy life and all these commitments that you have. So curiously, how do you keep up with the daily news cycle? What are your rituals or routines around that.

Well, I wake up, you generally wake up early, and by the time I get out of bed, I've usually read the Financial Times, the New York Times, City Morning Herald, and the ABC's news feed, and I also would read The New Yorker on a weekly basis, so that's my general news current affairs, and I watch a bit of news and current affairs each evening, and then I scan the journals, so i'm each week I would read the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal,

And I also talk to people, so.

Sometimes they accused of expressing my own opinion. I almost never express my own opinion. I just have a network of people that I regularly talk to and benchmark what I'm thinking is going on against what they're thinking is going on.

And there are often people that are all about.

Pretty much all people I trust that I know are actually independent.

And they're.

Making and if they give me advice, it's selfless advice that's really based on the evidence, and or give me information and they're all and they're tapped into their networks and they'll often contact me when they think something's going on. So that is a full time job in itself without your varying and for just doing that on a daily basis, I could imagine.

And so when you're reading through the various news publications and journal articles and speaking to people, what's your process for remembering and organizing all that information?

I wish if in this listening is quite a good process.

I'd love to hear from them, because I'll tell you naming thought about my organizational skills. In the late eighties, I ran Really National and I came into run Really National as the head Really National group at a time of crisis when Ready National was really disappearing off the face of the air of its audience was disappearing, and I had quite strong views about what should happen. And I came in and I was the person who started Really National Breakfast. I brought in Philip Adams to do

In fact, she was far more experienced than me. So she worked for me.

And I remember when I first went on the first time, I took a couple of weeks off. I said, and you've got to act for me. Now here's your main task. Apart from doing what you've got to do. You're going to have to tell me how I can organize my life better. I've clearly disorganized in my management style. Tell me what I'm doing wrong so that I can work twelve hours a day. Around fourteen I get back and sort of completely met hurt. And she'd be working fourteen

We'll be back with Norman soon and we'll be hearing about how he communicates such complex health information in such a clear and engaging way. But if you are after more content, something that I put out once every two weeks is a little newsletter with three things that I

It's hard, but you've just got to move on and learn that that's what's done is done, and you've got the next task in hand, and you can't get onto the next task unless you've just cleared your I call it my random access memory. You've just got to clear that intermediate memory so that your fort on.

The next thing.

And I just I've always had that ability to just I think medicine helps you to do that. By the way, So a training in medicine, if you if you ruminate on things and get obsessed with things, you don't make a good doctor. You've got to be able to deal with something. And then the next patient, that's the only patient in your life at that moment, and you've got to totally focus on that patient's story, get that sorted out.

So how did they train you to do that? Because that sounds amazing in theory, but how like, what strategies did they teach you in practice?

I think there's a bit of pre selection there is that if you're if you're not like that, you'll you'll not So, for example, if you're in acute medicine. I spent most of my training in acute medicine, pediatrics, surgery and things like that, but mostly pediatrics.

Is that.

If you're not like that, you probably would not do that specialty and you would find something else to do. I suppose that's the case, and you're just forced to do I mean, and I had a couple of bosses who really showed me how to do it as well, So it was on the job training rather than medical school training.

If I really think hard about it.

Now, something that I always find really impressive when I listen to you is just how effective you are communicating health information that can be quite complex, but doing it in a really clear and simple way. And I want to know how do you do it? Like what's going on behind the scenes when you're thinking about how to communicate complex things simply?

Look, that's taking years to develop when I've.

So one of the joys of what I'm doing do is it's exactly what you say. I mean, I really love it. That's what I really love. I loved storytelling, and so that's what journalism is is discipline storytelling and I and when you're telling a story, you've got to work out what the narrative is, how to engage people in that narrative, how to stop their minds drifting to something else so that they're always there. And I liken it to grabbing somebody by the neck, sitting them down.

He was environmental journalist. I was health and health.

Side, and we used to work together and do that task together. He had something that he wanted to communicate it till he wanted to communicate. We workshop how we did it, and we'd read each other's scripts and give people and give each other feedback. And we did that for some years. And I think that once you've been doing that sort of thing for some years, you kind of get what works and what doesn't work. And now one of the pleasures I.

Get is actually working with young incoming broadcasters and working on their scripts and showing them ways of changing the story, how you might create a metaphor an image something to grab onto and get that rhythm right and pass that on. But it's just years and years of doing it and practicing and getting feedback, and years and years of failure as well. And learning from your failures.

So when you are editing, say a less experienced and script, for example, what are some of the things that you're looking for or are some of the pieces of advice that you find yourself giving often?

Well, I think the mistake that some people make, and it's not just young kids coming in and learning, it's people. Something you're doing is that you feel you're on a mission to explain. And if you feel you're on a mission to explain, you're going to fail before you start. That's why I'm talking about storytelling.

Now.

Storytelling is episodic. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it also has episodes within it. And you don't tell the whole story up front. You've got to give people a reason to move on. So the common things that I find people do is they give away the story at the beginning. All you've got to do at the beginning is give people a reason to listen because it's going to be a payoff, and make sure they do get a payoff.

It's explaining too much at one time rather than parsing up the information.

So that I'm going to give you a little bit, you get a little bit now, consolidate that little bit of information. Then I'll take you to the next place, and I'm taking you by the hand through the story. And you've got to trust me that i will take you by the hand and i will not lose you during the story.

That's it's fascinating hearing you talk about that, Like, what what else are you finding? You know, potentially common mistakes that people make or things that you're you know, other pieces of advice that you're that you often give.

Those are those are the main ones.

The other problem of this is a radio and television thing rather than print journalism, but really intellivision thing is that you sometimes get people coming into it who want to be stars and don't want to put in the work,

Had a good.

Intellectual training. You know, there are people on this floor at Greatly National PhDs and PhDs in German literature and so on. It's just, you know, are really we actually don't hire that many people with media degrees. We probably preferentially go with somebody who's got an English degree, a history degree, who's got who's done further education, gone down the track a little bit, but also learned how to tell stories simply.

And there's entertaining.

Often just sit there and interview somebody for a job and are they boring me or are they entertaining me? And I'd love to have dinner with them? And you know, somebody I'd like to have dinner with be entertaining all night. Then you're kind of getting there. You're kind of getting there now.

As a health journalist, something that you have to do as part of your role is you interview a lot of people and I believe that you will often have your producer or producers do a pre interview with people that you're interviewing, as my producer Jenna did with you, And I'd love to know, I mean, you know, particularly for people that have no idea what a pre interview is, I'd love to hear your perspective on, you know, what is the role of a pre interview, how do you

So, by and large, I only do pre interviews for interviews that are alive because you've got no.

Margin for error in a live interview.

So a lot of it is actually to find out whether somebody's, what we say, good talent or not.

So can they express themselves, are they clear? And will they keep the.

Audience engaged for the seven or eight minutes that they need to be on air and tell their story clearly, as well as finding out what the story is in more depth. But it's as much about a screening process, because if you've got somebody who is a bad explainer or a really boring speaker, you do not want.

Them on their live Now it's funny, I always feel like slightly self conscious when I have guests on the show and part of their role is to interview other people, and Norman, I'd love to get any feedback that you have for me on how this interview is felt for you and what I could be doing better as an interviewer.

No, this is good because you are enthusiastic, You're conversational. I know what I said to your producer when I got the pre interview, and you're not following the pre interview.

You are. You're following your gut feel and you're following the interview.

Because that's the other thing, yes, is that an interview is a conversation and you certain information you want to get out of it.

But if you so.

The other thing I tell new people to the game is try not to have a list of questions that go one to twenty. I tend to have a mud map. People are often horror and it goes back to my organization, my pro organization. So but I often have a mud map. I know there's things I need to hit and there might be the right sequence to start. You know, if

And being very tuned into inflections and emotion.

And mood and stuff that you've not heard by that person before.

That allows you to go for it.

Now for people that want to get their hands or a copy of So you think you know what's good for you, and also consume other things, all the other amazing things that you are putting out into this world. What's the best way for people to do that?

Well? So you think, so you think you know what's good for you?

Is available from Torpia or Amazon or your local bookshop, so that so you get that. There's Corona cast, so you can down that wherever you get your podcasts or

Amazing.

Norman, thank you so much for sharing some of your time with me today, given how busy you are, it's just been an absolute pleasure.

And the pleasures all mine. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you got some useful stuff from my chat with Norman. Now, if you are not a subscriber or follower of How I Work, now is the time to hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening to this from, because next week I've got Fulbright scholar Holly Ransom talking about why micro habits have been the key to her success, and she has a hell of a lot of other practical tips to share. How I Work is produced by Inventium with