S6E11 KSD 2.0: Master Class on Mental Health from my personal coach...

So you want the wise mind driving the bus, but all of these other parts of yourself can be passengers and you can hear them. You can be like, "Oh, hey anxiety. What's up? What do we need to worry about today?" Okay, cool. Let me write that down. And then you can go back to your seat, your job is done. We're good. We got it from here.

And as always, if there's an episode, you really like send it over to your friends They'll probably like it too. Thank you so much. And let's get back to the show. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. So we have Krista or KSD. So Krista Scott Dixon on again, the first repeat guest on our show. So that's, you have that in your name and my personal coach.

So I actually go to Krista to coach me as well because I deeply value the importance of coaches being coached and everybody being coached. And how can we essentially be better. So brief introduction again on her she's precision nutrition's curriculum designer. So this is one of the biggest online nutrition coaching software companies in the world.

And there she built responsible for building out PM's women's their men's coaching program, their level one certification level, two certifications, lots of other certifications that they have now at this point as well. She has a PhD from York university is a trained counselor and then is an author of several books very knowledgeable, very wise, and so excited to have you here on the show again, cause.

And I do wanna start with that because that's obviously where you started, but gives us some background for how you worked through that as well. So can you explain some of that challenge for you where that came from and how you started to do the work necessarily to overcome that and work through it?

And I don't mean to make this sound overly clinical, but I think this is important to understand because when we think eating disorders. A lot of times we have this image of either a binge eater or kind of the classic anorexic. Who's always like a young white girl kind of thing. Like there's just very stereotypical ideas about what disordered eating looks like.

And so, I think it's important for all of the folks who've had these experiences to talk about them, to show like, actually this is a very layered phenomenon and experience. And so like my own journey was, I didn't fit these profiles. I wouldn't say I had, I mean, I grew up in a family that just ate their feelings. Right. And not necessarily in a pathological way, but we were just a family that loved to eat. One side of my family was Ukrainian, like food is love. Right.

so family gatherings were just like, it's not all you want to eat. It's all you can eat. Right. And so food is a really effective way to manage feelings and connect and socialize. And, but for me it was never really particularly troublesome. And until many years later when I was in my thirties and I took up Brazil jujitsu and grappling and boxing and I started competing and I started cutting weight for competitions, which meant that I was restricting quite significantly.

I was doing intermittent fasting at the time I was training a ton, two, three times a day. And so what starts to happen in these situations is your brain goes, okay, wait a minute. Like you were imposing a lot of stress on this organism and you're not putting a lot of energy into the tank. So, we might need to take the wheel here and change some of your brain chemistry and processing so that all of a sudden, you really want to eat food and particular kinds of food.

So I started going into the cycle of I would cut weight for competition or restrict or train really hard. And then I would binge and I had weird food cravings and just all these kind of strange things started happening. And I didn't really know how to make sense of it because I was like, well, but I'm not. I'm not anorexic. I don't wanna be thin, I wanna be lean. I wanna be jacked. So I had a particular lens on it that at the time I didn't realize was disordered eating.

I thought I wanted to be fit. I wanted to be jacked. I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to perform athletically Like it was just kind of confusing to me to have this experience. And it was something that I hit for quite a long time. Because working with a lot of folks at Precision Nutrition, for example, a lot of them are former athletes. And so I was like, well, they don't seem to struggle. Like they seem to have gotten with the program in a very effortless way.

I must be the only one who's actually struggling with food related issues. Of course it turns out that's not the case. And probably almost every nutrition coach in the business has had this experience at some point or another in some form. So that is the not so secret of the industry is that, people who are in nutrition and fitness have their own struggles with nutrition and fitness.

So, hopefully if you're listening and you're feeling like, oh my God, I'm the only one I assure you that you're not. So it took a number of years to sort my way out of this. And there were lots of layers. It wasn't just about the food. It's never just about the food. It was about managing stress and physiological regulation and emotions and deeper beliefs about myself and what I was here to do. And so like, it was all a rich tapestry but you know, I'm out of it now, quite thankfully.

And but there was lots of layers to it. So yeah, it was a very interesting ride. Let's just say that.

Like I struggled in the past tense with, an eating disorder or with, depression, whatever it is. And it's like, that's not really how life works. And I love that. Just it's an ongoing thing, right? It's an ongoing process and one: you're not alone, but I do wanna talk about that aspect. Right? And this applies in any area of your life. We all have these areas that are the darker side of ourselves and we don't want people to know, and that we feel so isolated in that. What are your advice?

What are your recommendations for people around that? How do you go about navigating through that isolation and that feeling of isolation?

That was like, what's a weird, but innocuous habit you picked up during the pandemic. And one, one person was. This is my stick collection. I have big sticks and little sticks and medium sized sticks and they're my collection. But then people started dueting this video, like I too have a stick collection.

I have also picked up sticks on the I have a stick sitting on top of a picture in my house right now, and so whether it's stick, picking up or disorder eating or anxiety, or, any other kind of mental health issue, you are not alone. It is impossible to be alone in something that kind of strikes deeply at the human condition. And that's really what this is right. Is the human condition, the condition of being human. And so, we're talking about mental health.

Yes, we have intrinsic tendencies, there are genetic and epigenetic tendencies. There are things that happen to you. We call them adverse childhood experiences that may shape your propensity to go a certain direction. There may be things that happen to you later in life. And then there's maybe, probably just everyday pressures that, that add up like a bunch of paper cuts. But, in terms of mental health being a set of processes, It's not a thing that you either have, or you don't.

If we think about how health works health is largely an emergent property that comes from doing a set of behaviors, right? Like dental health. If I don't brush my teeth and Flos my teeth and, you avoid eating too much candy, like my dental health breaks down. And similarly, if I don't have strong social connections, if I don't have a sense of belonging or a sense of purpose, if I don't have movement, if I don't have good nutrition, if know, my daily life is just full of stressors.

Well, of course I'm gonna have mental health issues, right. It's not a fricking mystery. So, in terms of, where people can get support, obviously I'm a big fan. Like you are, counseling, coaching therapy, those are sort of, doing something one on one. But I think that's a big jump for a lot of people to get there. And sometimes the cost is quite prohibitive.

So, starting with something like an online community can be really helpful or just talking to that one person in your friend or family group that you think is gonna get it. There's always statistically, that one person that's gonna get it. So finding that one person and having that conversation with them is often the start for a lot of people and then finding a supportive community of some kind where. People, you can share your experiences and no one says, oh, that's dumb. That's crazy.

Just cheer up, just relax or whatever the crap people say. But instead they say, yes, I see that I get that. That happened to me too. Or I can relate or I'll validate you in some way. I think that's really critical. And I mean, the internet has given the pine cone fetish, but it's also given us, these kinds of communities that I think can be really super helpful for people to kind of just come and not feel like a weirdo.

And then hopefully potentially, be empowered to take the next steps, to really support their own mental health.

And like you said, finding those spaces where you can feel like, the ability to be safe enough to be vulnerable enough to share. How you're really feeling. And like you said, there are tons of people out there that are doing the same thing. And that's what I love about what you do and what you do so well is the accepting of human experience. And actually how can we accept these parts of ourselves that we typically disown? And I wanna ask you about that.

How do you go about like, there's, a lot of these behaviors reflect these underlying things. So the behavior like you, you talk about is not the problem. It's a reflection of something else that's going on. So how do you go about one exploring that? How do you go about actually beginning to accept these different parts of yourself along the journey?

Like, there's going to be parts of yourself that you're probably never going to like very much, there's part of all of us, that's a total douche bag and we're like, Ugh, like I just wish you weren't in my life like who, who brought that guy? Right. But you know, one of the frames I have found quite useful for clients is to understand that all of these parts have a function. They have a job, and a lot of them were developed at times in our life.

Usually earlier times in our life, when we did not have the full spectrum of adult mature, grown up coping tools, right? Like our prefrontal cortex, like a lot of these kind of thinky reasoning, parts of our brain are not even fully online until our mid twentie. Well, a lot of bad stuff can happen between zero and 25. Right? And so we develop these parts to cope with whatever we experience and in the moment that coping was the best that we could do given the limited toolbox.

So if something hard happens to you when you're three or your five or your 10, like you're gonna be solving that problem with a three, five or 10 year old mind. And of course it's not gonna be a really great solution to your 30 year old self. Right. But when I explain this to clients and then what we do is sometimes even find a picture of them as a child.

And with this picture in mind, talk about this child, almost like a separate person, like, what do you think this little person would've liked? And that's very helpful because most of us have some kind of like intrinsic compassion for small children and small children suffering. And the idea like, oh my God. Yeah. Like that stuff happened to this little kid and they did the best that they could with what they had. Like it starts to soften the edge of that.

And so first people start to see the reason why this exists. They start to soften towards it rather than being really harsh about it. And then sometimes with that softening, it's almost like they invite that part to kind of integrate. Right. And so one of the metaphors that is often used is like, you're driving a bus and you have passengers on the bus, right? So maybe your anxiety is a passenger and your depression is a passenger and, whatever is a passenger.

But the goal is to make sure that the you-ness of you, the wise self, they call it wise mind in some places the wise mind is driving the bus, right? The wise mind is something that integrates both feelings, emotions, like all that information that our emotions give us. And then like reason and logic and strategy and kind of thinking, and it brings them together into wisdom and discernment.

So you want the wise mind driving the bus, but all of these other parts of yourself can be passengers and you can hear them. You can be like, oh, Hey anxiety. Like what's up? What do we need to worry about today? Okay, cool. Let me write that down. And then you can go back to your seat, your job is done. We're good. We got it from here. And so I think to a lot of people that feels like kind of a nice integration, because you are never going to get parts rid of these parts of yourself.

Like they're here to stay. I'm I have 48 years of anxiety practice. That's not going away. And I definitely found that, when I was able to accept the anxiety. I even have a little character for it in my mind. It looks like the creature from the black lagoon, which makes it kind of funny. So I actually imagine myself like hanging out with it, like on airplane flights, like it's there, like beside me in the seat, like eating the peanuts or whatever. Right.

So there's this multi-stage process of first demonstrating whatever this thing that you don't like it had a job to do. You can see how it got the idea that this was useful. It helped you at the time. It's probably no longer helpful. Let's see if we can soften towards it, bring some compassion and then maybe integrate it into our current self and also use it superpowers. Right? Sometimes these parts of ourselves are actually really excellent at something.

Like my anxiety makes damn sure I don't forget my passport. I don't forget my keys. I'm an extremely conscientious person and so I'm never that person that's forgetting all their stuff or like going to the wrong appointment. That doesn't happen. Thanks to my anxiety. So you can kind of also give it a job if it has superpowers, whatever it is. So that's kind of long-winded I hope I kind of, answered your question.

Going back to that kid and seeing myself how I was way before all of that, I'm like, oh, these are my values. Like, this is the person that I want to show up as in the world.

And then like you talked about, you have that wise, or like the elder Sage type of yourself and actually going to the, using the other visualization, going to the end of your life, and basically picturing, sitting down with yourself at the wise elder stage part of yourself, which you have inside of yourself already, but just going, like, what are they saying is important about life?

It's all that deathbed test, does it pass that kind of idea, but you can get a really good idea of the legacy that you want to have and your, the depth of the values that you carry or a life lived really well in congruence with those values. When you look at that, Elder Sage part of yourself and you sit down with them and go, like, what advice do you have for me? And you can do the same thing with your little kid and your little kid for yourself.

But I find, I just find it really fascinating, how we can almost manipulate time or manipulate our past, like rewrite our past, look at our future, bring our future into the present, being the feelings that we'd have at that moment, from both sides into the present. The other thing that you mentioned is really fascinating. So one, you have this idea of accepting yourself, right? So you're accepting the inner, your inner Childs.

You have this understanding that begins to develop where you see you're doing the best that you can, these behaviors, whatever there, or however it comes out is a reflection of you doing the best that you can. And so there's the accepting of this, but the other aspect of this is almost the ability to be able to give yourself distance from these parts. And that's what I saw. It's so interesting. It's like integrating 'em all together.

And then at the same time, seeing them as the parts on the bus, right? You see as like, oh, this is my, my angry person. This is my anxious, creature for the blue lagoon or whatever that part of myself. And so giving yourself that distance is also really fascinating because you can see it clearly. It's not so much of like, Oh, gosh, this is me. I am X, Y, and Z, awful miserable, terrible, failure, whatever. You can give yourself distance.

And from that perspective, you can see what is good and what is detrimental about those things. And I just find both of those things, really interesting, the combination of it, an acceptance and integration, and then also the ability that distance gives you from that.

It's like, when you stare at yourself in the mirror, like really close and you're like, oh my God, like my nose is such a weird shape in my eyebrow. Like, every single hair is bizarre. Like, like when you really zoom in on something it actually doesn't create happiness. It creates the opposite. Right.

Whereas when we have brain states that are more expansive when we're looking at big picture, when we're looking at figuratively or literally a landscape when we're able to sit back and consider the human condition. That is when we can actually be much happier. So it's almost like again and I think it's Ian McGilchrist that talks with this in his book, the Divided Brain, not the divided brain the Master in his Emissary which is that, this thinky analytical detail part of our brain.

That's like, that's the part that ruminates and focuses on like the shirt that we wore that was a bad choice. That part is a great servant. It's really good for playing chess, planning, menus, like doing that thinky work, but it's a terrible boss and it should not be in charge. It's like having, like think of your job. And as like, if there's like a horrible bean counter kind of person at that job, like Susan in accounting and you're like, oh God, like she's such a pill. Right. great.

But Susan really great at accounting. That's, her job is to be like a bean counter, but she's just humorous and not super fun. We don't wanna put that part of our brain in charge of our lives. We want the big picture kind of expansive piece. And so, like you say, pulling the camera back. Allows us to get this larger perspective. And it also allows us to connect to other people. Cause when we're down the rabbit hole, we're like in our own rabbit hole, right. We're not with other people.

So pulling the camera back also allows us to make better social connections and to really think about stuff like meaning purpose, it's that whole, what do I imagine the end of my life to be? Right. It allows us to kind of get a a larger sense of time. And you mentioned memories. And I think that's really interesting because memories are not stored like photographs. It's not like a snapshot that's just filed, right?

When we encode memories, we almost turn them into little mosaics and pull them apart and store the pieces and then put the pieces back together and bring them into recall. And what that means is that we can Recode memories. And so part of the work that I like to do is to go back find a memory bring it into the present and kind of give it a different emotional or somatic body based tone so that when you restore that memory it's fundamentally shifted for you.

So for example, like, let's say we call it a memory of like, oh my God, I was really embarrassed this one time in fourth grade and it was terrible and it's been so traumatic and whatever, right. We pull that up and you kind of interact with it in some way, and then maybe you restore it and like, well, yeah, that was embarrassing. But also it was kind of cute.

And I guess that stuff happens in fourth grade and I wasn't the only kid that peed their pants or I dunno, like whatever or you imagine, I don't know, whatever you imagine but somehow that emotion feels different. And there's a really profound shift in how your brain perceives that memory. So it no longer has the sting to it anymore. It's been, kind of softened, like I said, it's given a new tone and ideally the best case outcome is to use it as a way to show here's how you showed resilience.

Here's how you showed strength. Here's how you showed some kind of resources. So that when you, again, sort that memory, you're like, oh yeah, you know what? I'm right. I'm all right.

Taking these risks, talks about comfort being just like the death of our lives, right? The whole decade, 10, 10 years. I can't even remember a single thing from it because how we store the memories is associated with these strong emotions. But on the negative emotion sites, he said a very similar thing, how you handle some of those is you when you pull it up, you have to do the work to make sure that when you put that back, it's in a lighter state than when than before.

And it can be a very delicate work. Especially when we have deeper traumas, but that's something that you do really well that The thing that I wanna talk about in relationship to this, so we have, and you even mentioned it, we have these situations and stuff and anxiety and stress basically just tunnels us down into the microcosm of like the pimple on our face, so to speak. Right.

And we also know from genetics too, that like, we may have this disposition to something, but it's the stimulus and it's the environment that actually can turn that on or off. Can you talk about what people can do? The ways that we can start to recognize the stress and the anxiety, what that does to us physiology and again, tools that we can have to do things that may potentially a little bit different than what we've been doing right now.

And unfortunately, one of the consequences of particular kinds of stress or trauma is that you become so dissociated or disconnected from your physiological and emotional experience that you think you're fine. Right? It's your body's way of protecting you. Let's just dial down the awareness of how much pain we're actually in so that this person can function. So when you talk to these people as adults, they're like, oh no it's not so bad.

And I remember a time in my life when it was like, I call it the worst year of my life where a bunch of these kind of major stressors happen, deaths in the family and job stuff, relationship stuff. But if you'd asked me. I would've told you like, oh, like two or three outta 10, it's really not so bad. Meanwhile, I'm not sleeping. I'm getting blasted out of bed with a heart rate of 110 in the middle of the night. I'm losing weight. I can't eat food.

Tastes like Ash, the go to the he's, like I go the doctor, he's like, you look fine. I'm like, well, yeah, cuz I, I think a lot of this developed these coping mechanisms where we become ultra functional, we just get stuff done. We just handle our business and then like, we're just corroding inside. So, and I meet a lot of, especially professional people like that kind of high performing professional people, the oldest children of the world.

like, I joke that I'm like an oldest child of two oldest children. So it was like inevitable that I would be just like completely, functional and disconnected from a lot of the stuff. But so there are some simple tools that we use to sort of bring you back into awareness. Now that can be things mind body scans, that can be more objective indicators, right?

Like maybe you're someone who likes your fitness gadgets, and you can look at your heart rate variability, for example, or, like kind of indicators like that. Or we can do something like a stress events, assessment on you where we're like, okay, what's happened to you in the last few years, or, did any of these things happen to you when you were younger?

So there's kind of different ways we can come at the issue of increasing people's awareness, but I would argue there definitely should always be some kind of development of the felt sense. Like on some level we have to get people feeling back into their bodies, which again can be really hard if someone has kind of spent a long time dissociating, but if it's like, okay, we only get sensation in your finger. Great. Like we'll work with the finger, right.

until you can feel other parts of your body. And that really is the work. And Peter Levine has been amazing. The somatic experiencing guy, he really has demonstrated very compellingly that this kind of work definitely has to begin and end with the body. And it's not that cognitive stuff is not helpful. It's just that so much of this is happening in the body as the base of the iceberg. It's not in our conscious awareness. Right.

So if I go to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and I'm like, if I don't even know if I'm stressed consciously, like I can't, you can't use this tool necessarily to change what's going on. So. That's that part of the question now, what are the other people? Hang on one second.

Like there's definitely uses for CBT. It's just that for many of us, it doesn't go deep enough and it doesn't get at the source of a lot of these things at their root and the research is increasingly showing that we need to work at the level of emotions of attachment and connection relationships and the body.

So can you talk about, I mean, you mentioned some of these things, these mind body scans and things like that what are some of the. And that would be a simple one. Right. If we're just starting with like, like you said, feeling the one little point on your finger talk about the mind, body scans, talk about some of these things that people can do to just at least get a foundation a starting point for this. Yeah.

Is your hair tickling you like whatever it is. Usually when I do it with clients, I try to attach emotions to it. Like, do you notice that the sensations are connected to any kind of emotion that you could name and sometimes people like to connect it with thoughts too. So as scan the body what thoughts are emerging? So it could be something like, oh, my stomach is really, it feels really weird and bubbly and nervous.

And oh, now I'm thinking that I'm really anxious about, whatever, blah, blah, blah, this thing I'm doing tomorrow So I like to keep it a little bit somatic, cuz I find that people really wanna get to the thoughts. People love living in the zone of cognition. It's so much more comfortable for most people to just be in thinky brain. So often I really try to keep people coming back to their bodies over and over again. Cuz that's the place they don't wanna be. right.

So my job as a coach is to kind of create that productive discomfort. So yeah, so a body scan is just basically going down your body and noticing whatever sensations you can distinguish and then you can also try amplifying the cues. Right? So like, you can, I'm making this gesture of like patting my hands together. Right. You can put your palms together and kind of press and feel how that is or, touch some part of your body and go, oh, what is that like? Or, how does my bum feel on the seat?

Or how do my feet feel on the floor? Like, you start to kind of try to increase the information that's coming into your senses so that you can start to discern things. And then I also really using sensory stuff too, because most sensory things happen in real time, unlike thinking, which can predict into the future and whatever the past. Right. So sensory stuff is like, what are you smelling? Right. What are you hearing?

Sounds are great because most people can kind of fixate on sounds pretty well and sounds can only occur in real time. It can be things like, again, touch if you're eating mindfully, it can be what you're tasting, but things like sound and smell, I think are really perfect for getting us back into our body and touch as well. Like I said so that's the kind of the mind, body scan, anything. Sensory is really a tool that you can use. And so I really encourage people to get super creative with it.

Do you just like, I know that sounds weird, but do you just like smelling things, like how little kids always have those smelly erasers or smelly markers if they love those. I dunno. If you ever had like the Mr. The scratch of stiff stickers. No, the Mr. Sniffy markers, that was like, oh yeah. Yeah. Like kids love those things and God knows what was in them, but for sure. Yeah. A whole host of other problems that can come from that. That's right.

We got brain damaged from the toxicants in, but anyway, the green apple was topnotch, but you know, like you can create opportunities to amplify sensory information for yourself, of whatever ilk works for you. And I'm also a big fan of things like pets go in. If you have a pet go and find your pet and interact with it in a very tactile way, just animal sniff, just sniff your pet

But then also, as you mentioned and this is, this has been huge for me, that ability to come back into your body and the more you can train that as like a, oh, I'm feeling this, like I'm really angry, maybe I'm like about to lose it on my kid. That ability to go, oh wow. Let me actually come back into my body. And like you talked about, you can train to go, like, what are my senses and stuff doing?

And other guests that I've had on, even for kids, they have like a, they call the five, four, three, two, one method. So you can go like, what are five things that I'm seeing right now? what are four things that I'm feeling? What are three things that I'm hearing, two things that I'm smelling, or, one thing I'm tasting and, or, whatever you do, you can just use that formula and just that aspect of going, oh, wow. Let's get out of here, come back to here. And reset around.

That can be really huge. Like it's difficult to overstate how important that is in terms of, regulating and being a continue to notice what's going on in your body.

But if you're someone who kind of tends more towards tension, if you can physically practice consciously relaxing yourself, it is much more difficult to experience distress and anxiety when you are physiologically in a relaxed state. So that's kind of a useful little hack. And so even stuff like contract release, right? Like tense up your whole body for five seconds, and then just let it go. A lot of people can kind of get the hang of that one pretty easily.

And so that's a tool that you can use, even stuff that. Snaps you into the present. Like one of, one of the tricks I will do with my partner's daughter, sometimes if she's getting kind of, activated is I'll grab an ice cube from the freezer, we call it the ice cube game and I'll be like, okay, I bet you can't hold this in your hand until it melts. And she'll be like, I bet I can. Right. She thinks it's a game of like pain tolerance.

What I'm doing is resetting her nervous system so that it yanks her brain out of the fight flight overactivation over her math homework. It brings her into the presence so that she can kind of regulate herself.

So how can we work in the realm of like 5% actions? And if you start to build a roster of them. So one of the things we do with clients sometimes is come up with like a roster or a menu of small actions that you can fairly easily do. And it's good to have this kind of list in advance because when you're stressed out, when you're activated, you're not gonna remember this. Right. So you gotta like whip out the list and go, okay, like what do I do? What do we do when we feel this way? Right.

And that helps them talk, you talk yourself off the ledge. So, we can kind of customize, like, what are the five minute actions that for you are regulating? Are you someone who's really social? So you call your sister and complain for five minutes and you guys laugh and hang up and you feel so much better. Right. Is that something that works for you again? Do you have a pet? Does snuggling your dog work for you to calm you down for five minutes?

I've had clients who are super stressed out about the evening, scramble with the kids, homework, baths, making lunches, getting them in bed. Everyone's completely, rangy. And what we do is often kind of see what extraneous activities we can cut in favor of snuggle time and snuggle time is so regulating for both the parents and the children, the kids calm down, the parents calm down. So that over time bedtime becomes less of a horror show.

So that's something any kind of snuggling being outside, any kind of nature, garden, green space, whatever you have. Sometimes just I used to tell people working in offices back when that was a thing, find the long way to the bathroom, right. Just find the long way to the bathroom and during your trip to and from the bathroom, use that time to collect yourself. And then there's the obvious stuff five minutes of meditation. Can you get to bed five minutes earlier? Can you drink a glass of water?

Can you eat one more vegetable? So really it's kind of thinking about, what activities are to me truly restorative. And what are the tiniest increments of that, that I could start adding through my day. Could you hug your partner for 30 seconds longer? Cause know, sometimes like, especially if we've been married or together for a long time, like you do the perfunctory hug as they're on their way at the door, maybe you don't even do that. Right. And you're like, okay, bye. The next thing. Right.

And so like, what I do with my partner is I'm like, no, like no escaping, we're gonna hug for 30 seconds. And like, you can feel both people just kind of go, ah, and that's very regulating. So like hug the people in your life extra long. That, that. Costs you almost no time at all, but the benefits are quite significant and something else. I mean, comedy for me, like laughing, we know is very restorative. I'm a huge fan of, standup comedy.

I will Google standup comedy videos, watch them for five minutes, laugh and be like, okay, I'm good. Right. Or off whatever So, there's all kinds of things and really it's sort of what, what speaks to you. So I guess what I would say is the overarching principle is. So we go back to the deep health paradigm. Think about what would restore or rejuvenate you in these different dimensions, right? Physical, mental, or cognitive, emotional, social, relational existential or spiritual.

And then what would create like a restorative environment for you? Would five minutes of decluttering make you feel better in your environment? Probably for most of us, like I'm looking around my living room. I'm like, oof, I gotta get on this. Right. So there's lots and lots of different options.

But if you think about, okay, where can I get a win in one of these domains, it starts to open up a lot more possibilities because maybe you can't like, let's say you were you're a frontline healthcare worker working long shifts and your physical health is like in the toilet. And you're like, listen, I don't see a change in the foresee future here. Okay, cool. What else can you do in another domain? To kind of, try to get some recovery, even if it's. You know what?

I'm spend a little extra money, get meal delivery, get a salad or something. I don't know. I'm just making this up or like, I'm gonna again, hug my partner extra long. I'm gonna go outside for some fresh air, whatever it is, but so be creative and kind of work in the dimensions that are available to you right now, rather than trying to fit your recovery into some kind of arbitrary plan that someone else has, like, oh, you should meditate for 15.

Like for me, I'm just like, hell no, ain't nobody got time for that. but I am a big fan of watching Netflix in the bathtub. So that is my dream.

Like when you're looking at it as a holistic picture, you go, if I'm winning in some area of recovery in one of these six or eight, or however we wanna classify, compartmentalize our different areas of life, then you're doing something to build that recovery. And it's overlooked so much, or we try to fit that circle into that square hole, the square into the circle hole. That kind of idea where it just like some guru or some motivational person said do this.

And it's like, that just doesn't work. And you're just bashing our head against it where maybe going for a walkout in nature is you're a jam. So I really appreciate. And you talked about, you talked about that hug and doing it for a little bit longer. Can you talk cuz that has a lot to do with attachment theory and things like that in terms of relationships, can you get into that a little bit more and what people can do to with the knowledge of some of that stuff?

How they can, again, help a little bit in terms of some other things that they could do on the relationship side.

But I think sometimes what we forget, especially in North America, I think other parts of the world are a little bit different in the way that they think about things. And especially in the US I think Canadians are somewhat more collectivists than the US, but you know, there is no way to succeed as a lone individual. Like we as mamals are evolved as social animals. Right. So there's no getting around the fact that even if you're super introverted, like don't get me wrong. I love my alone time.

A lot of times I have this fantasy about like a uni bomber cabin in the woods of like some isolated mountain cabin, right. so I completely value alone time, but there's a difference between alone time that you love and that you're totally into, and you're, I don't know, reading a book or whatever, and loneliness and alienation, and that's the problem that we're really facing to, to kind of circle back around to this mental health piece.

So as social animals, in some way, we require other people to help regulate us and to help support us. And so that can be everything from logistical support, I had eye surgery, but six months ago I needed someone to get me home. Right. I would do it myself. I actually did try to do it myself. And they were like no. They frown on people stumbling outta their office, not being able to see. But you know, so we need other people just from a logistical sense, all the way to the spiritual sense.

Even if it's that's things like exchanging ideas or working on thoughts together, like workshopping ideas, your ideas are always gonna be better if you workshop them with somebody else. Even if they disagree with you, but it's that act of doing it. But we know that we require other human beings to regulate us. And what I mean by that it's called co-regulation. And so we can enter into this relationship where you calm me down, I calm you down or you amp me up and I amp you up, right?

We're feeding off each other's energy. And ideally we start to surround ourselves with people that regulate us in positive ways, right. That make us feel happy when we wanna feel happy and are able to hold a space for us when we feel down, when we feel grief, when we're struggling those are the most wonderful kinds of relationships. But back in the day, I actually had a, I, I did a TikTok video about this that has gotten a time at this time of podcast, nearly 54,000 views.

And it was just a throwaway. And I just talked about being gen X. Being raised in the seventies and how, we were kind of like latchkey kids. And so we had, if we were lucky material things provided, but we did not have anyone caring about our emotional health. It was just not a thing because parents in the seventies, were their parents were depression, era people, right? Like, so there was no emotional health going on there either.

So we were the end point of this legacy of generational emotional issues. And so we, we didn't but the prevailing theory at the time with babies was like, oh, just let them cry it out. So put them alone in the room to sleep and they'll just cry it out. and they'll figure it out. Right. But like babies and young children do not have the neurological apparatus to regulate, figure it out. Why your caregivers it's like flinging the baby gerbil out and going, okay. Handle it.

I know you don't have fur yet, but you know, figure it out. That's not how human beings work. And so right from babyhood, even through to adulthood we need human beings, other human beings in some way or another. And we know, I mean the world health organization has talked about this loneliness and social alienation, social isolation, which can happen if you're surrounded by people, by the way, right.

Have you ever gone to a party and you didn't like anybody and you just felt alone, even surrounded by 50 people. Alienation is different than actually physically being alone, but loneliness and social alienation isolation are killers. Like they significantly increase our mortality and our morbidity and our risk of chronic disease. But conversely. One of the strongest predictors of healthy aging is social connection. My grandmother's in her mid nineties, she has people coming by all the time.

There's the phone is always ringing there. She's always gossiping. There's, it's almost like high school with my grandmother. She's like, well, Roberta said such and such today and I just nearly died. Like she has this incredibly active social world. And I am convinced that is what's keeping her going now it's anecdotal. But again, research confirms that social connection is one of the biggest predictors of longevity and health span.

Again, we try to, compartmentalize it, but basically you can look at like, is there a disconnection, even in terms of myself, like, do I feel alone inside of myself? And that's some of the other work that we're talking about, and then you can look at, do I feel alone in maybe my intimate connections, right?

Is there some sort of connection or disconnection there, and then for, people as well that like higher purpose, whether spirituality, religion, whatever that is the impact con contribution, is there actually a disconnect there as well, connection to that, or a disconnection to that as well. And interestingly enough, I mean, obviously this is, podcast about success engineering. I've been fascinated to look at so often in the Western world, we define success individually.

And basically when you define success individually, you are baking loneliness into the equation. Like you literally, like, if you say like success, it equals like independence. That is you all, you have to be 100% alone cuz you know, the ultimate level of independence is like, ah, it's just me. So it almost underneath the radar, you're baking loneliness into the equation. But when you talk to again, a lot of other cultures do this better.

And I had Jessica Joel Alexander, who wrote the Danish way of parenting and they do this totally different. And she has this concept, which blew my mind almost when she talked about it, she talked about the Hygge or the we-fulness she described it as we-fullness so we talk about mindfulness and it's a, me being mindful of my moment, right? Where she's like, no, it's actually built into their culture where they have a day that is about we-fullness like us actually being present as a unit.

And so what's fascinating to me is like, how would your definition of success change if you went, what if I was actually a part of my family unit and what would be success for the overall family unit and how would that actually just change my definition of success? And again, you can expand it out how far you want. Right.

And that's an interesting thing about being in different cultures, in China, you have a very big collective view of success as a country, and I've heard, commenting here with COVID is, people look at, Shanghai and things like that being locked down and they're like, how can we lock down 25 million people? But the comment I heard was like, well, they view the, it the country as a single child. Like, it's like, you can look at it as like an overprotective parent for a single child.

Like they're trying to do what they think is best for their single child and there's detriments and be, benefits to that. But it's interesting to how do you reframe that success? And what does it look like on, like you said, the loneliness, the attachment, ideas and how can we actually incorporate more of that in, into our life.

We need something from someone and times when we're independent, we're kind of on our own steam, but ideally we spend most of our time in interdependence. So it's just kind of like a mutual, collaborative benefit making each other better. And I've never quite understood this fear of collectivism or public health. And I think this really manifested itself during COVID where some people were just like, screw all y'all, I'm gonna do what I want. It's like, okay.

This is not like my choice to wear an ugly shirt. What I do directly, like if we think about it a certain way, I could actually murder somebody. Do you know what I mean? Through particular actions that I take during this experience, my actions affect other people completely directly. And so, but I think it was fascinating to see how different cultures, different countries, different people handled this kind of question of what is my responsibility. Do I even see myself as a member of society?

Like, that's the first question, right? Do I even see myself as a citizen? And I think it's fascinating that in recent years, like the word citizen has become replaced by taxpayer, which is quite close to consumer, right? It kind of skates all of these civic responsibilities that I have in, in Canada for those of you living in warmer climates, there is a whole social contract around shoveling your sidewalk. And, you recognize that you have to shovel your sidewalk for other people to you.

That's not just for you. And if you're that neighbor that doesn't shovel your sidewalk, Ugh, things are not gonna go well for you. But yeah, so this concept of inter interdependence I think is really powerful and it's also worth mentioning that even if we think that we don't need other people.

We will behave in ways that shows that we do, and I think a lot of the mindless scrolling that we do on Facebook and Instagram is kind of a yearning for a social connection, which is ultimately never going to be satisfied because we can never create the kinds of relationships, just these kind of superficial scrolling on social media that we can achieve with a real person or, I mean, you and I have never met in real life. Right. But I feel like we have a relationship.

So, but I think that a lot of people get into the cycle where they're yearning for social connection. They go to a place that doesn't really provide it, but says that it does. And then they emerge from this experience dissatisfied. And that just starts to cycle all over again. And to come back to the beginning of our conversation, it's like disordered eating, you binge you're restrict, you binge your restrict, it's like the whole cycle, right.

You get stressed out and the stress makes you eat more and then you eat more and then you're stressed or whatever. Right? So ideally for optimal health, we wanna break this cycle of finding ourselves in dissatisfying and unfulfilling social interactions and where possible, find deeper connection. And Cal Newport talks about this a lot in his books, which I really appreciate use the technology for deeper connection rather than as a substitute for deeper connection.

So, rather than liking someone's post on social, can you text them instead of texting them, can you call them instead of calling them, can you video call them? Right? Can you write them a letter? but to go back to the whole, like 1% better or five minute action. Can you deepen a social connection?

By like one degree I started randomly calling people, not just random people, but I started calling people that I know back in the day when they, those, although that is a thing I've heard fun stories about that but no. So I, I started calling people that I knew, but just randomly like unpredictably and in the beginning, some of them were like, is everything okay? Because in 2022, you don't call someone unprompted unless it's an emergency, but it always turned into something really fun.

Even if they couldn't talk, even if it was like, oh my God, I'm so busy. I can't talk right now. We laugh joke for two minutes and peace out and it feels good. So, if you're listening, ask yourself, how could I 1% better my depth of social connection today.

And it's again interesting in terms of where we divide the line of, ourself, other people, how we define success, how we define success, as a whole can really affect all of that. But like you talk about the research is very clear on how we absolutely need other people for our happiness, for, I mean, everything, the trickle effects around it is tremendous. So like you said, just 1%, 1% better. How can we do that in terms of our relationships?

As we wrap up here, is there anything else that you wanna say before we close?

They're like, oh, like I just wanted abs, like I just wanted abs in six weeks and now you're laying this like whole, that was

Like evolution has given us certain requirements of being human. We need food, we need water, we need sunlight. We need to regulate our circadian rhythm. There's just stuff that we require as human beings and tending to all of these different domains of health, particularly mental and emotional health and social health is part of it. And this is inescapable. And so the sooner we make our peace with this and start working on it the better.

And again, it doesn't have to, you don't have to tackle this all at once. And to be honest, once you get everything sorted. The game changes you're like, okay, cool. I just got into my perfect relationship and perfect job and perfect, spiritual alignment or whatever. And then life being what it is your brain is like, let's grow, let's go into the next phase. And you're like, damn it. Yeah, just cut this all neatly organized and labeled alphabetically. And so this is just, it is how it is.

It's cycles of decay and growth. So you do not have to do everything at once. Do the 1% do the five minute action, just start picking away at it. But over time that will accumulate and you will definitely notice a difference.

So again, thank you. Thank you for your time. Like we said, first, first repeat guest, but obviously it's worth it. And every conversation is really fun that we have. So I really appreciate your time and yeah. Appreciate your insight.