Welcome to another edition of the podcast where I interview a range of interesting guests on different topics to do with enhancing your mind, your body and your brain. Today's episode is an absolute cracker. Doctor soph is a UK based neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who has just written one of the best books that I happen to have read, all around habits, why we do things, but also how to become unstuck out of behaviors that are not helpful
for us or not serving us well. And it is an absolute tour of force around human psychology and I will actually find it really hard to believe that somebody would not walk away with lots of usable, actionable things that they can use to improve their life straight away. And if you don't laugh out lied lots, you need a sense of humor transplant. Before we jump into the podcast, I have a fever to ask from you, my listeners.
It is a massive fever in terms of the impact that it will have on the podcast, but a small fever in terms of the impost on your time. And what we know about podcasts is that ratings and from you guys, the listeners, have a huge impact on the growth of the podcast and also the positioning in the
charts which then helps with growth. So could I please ask you to at the end of this podcast and just jump onto your fevorite whatever one you're listening from, whether it's app of Podcasts, Spotify or whatever, and then just write a review and ideally it would write a couple of lines on on why you enjoy the podcast, if you do and if you can't be arsed with that, just given us a number of stars and would be
a great help. So hopefully you can find the time and to just ge help give the podcast a little nudge. So now let's get on with it. Doctor Sophie More Welcome to the podcast. Hi, thank you so much for having me, and I believe I have you on a very warm day in lighty Yeah, I.
Can't believe it. It's one of those days where every other sentence you hear in the streets in the cafes is can you believe how hot it is? I'm so sweaty. I don't know what to do. We're so unused to being this hot and sweaty that it's basically the only topic we can talk about.
And tell me how hot has it been in the UK today.
A wild thirty degrees, which here is unheard of.
You know that all Australians are laughing their ass off right now. Oh my god, it's so hot. It's thirty degrees. I think I reckon the hottest I have ever seen. In Belfast when I lived there was maybe twenty nine. I think we've flirted with thirty degrees once. But if it's and I remember living and particularly Scotland for some reason,
was worse. I remember if it was seventeen degrees in sunny everybody had their shirt off and was in the park or in the beer holes or in the beer gardens and stuff like that.
And had sunburn by the end of the day. It's amazing. You can get sunburn in less than twenty degrees here. It's absolutely extraordinary.
Yes, yeah, no, it's crazy. Now you have been called by the Times no less in the UK, the guru of insta therapy. So talk us through that. How did they come to describe you as the guru of inst therapy?
Well, one, I think newspapers like a splashy headline, so I think that's how they came up with that. Firstly, Secondly, because in two thousand and eighteen roughly I left my job in the National Health Service, so the British Free Health Service, because I was seeing the same thing time and time again, irrespective of what service I was working in, so it didn't matter if it was neurology, if I was working in physical health, or if I was working
in mental health. In my first sessions with people as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing that no one had ever given them the basic psychological knowledge that we could have all been taught in schools, which meant that when they started to struggle, they often misunderstood themselves and then started to panic, thinking something's wrong with me. I'm going to be mad, I'm going to be bad, and then
this led to much more distress. That's not the fault of the NHS, but the NHS, that's quite underresourced at
the moment, was bearing the brunt of it. So I was like, right, I'm leaving my job and going out into the world, and I'm going to share the psychological knowledge for free, hopefully before people need it so they don't have to reach rock bottom and then sit on a waiting list, with both the hope that I, you know, get the information out to the masses so they didn't struggle, but also take some of the pressure off the NHS.
So the time's calling me the group of insta therapy is quite wild and a bit of a stretch, but refers to the fact that I was kind of one of the first people to go on to social media and start sharing information that's usually kept behind therapy room doors.
Yeah, and a very good way to reach people on mass. And as you say, if you can just prevent people from sliding into that vortex, because it often becomes a vortex right that they go down and dine. Now, so you have a degree in psychology, a master's in neuroscience, and then a PhD in clinical psychology. What got you interested in that area in the first place? Can you remember was it a certain moment, was it a teacher, was it somebody who inspired you? Oh?
Oh yeah, I remember wildly clearly. I think anyone who's been in this situation will remember this kind of moment. So I actually had never come across psychology. They didn't teach it in school. I was more of a kind of maths and physics girl. I was, you know, like a kind of nerd. I also was pretty wild for a nerd, But I just mean I wasn't introduced to psychology.
And then at eighteen, I had this very sudden fall from grace, so you know, this kind of cocky I'm invincible eighteen year old, and I suddenly had my first panic attack. Now, because I didn't know what was going on, I assumed that I was having heart attack. I really thought, oh my god, this is it. I'm going to die.
And one of the biggest predictors of having one panic attack and have that turn into multiple panic attacks is if you misinterpreted its a sign of something extremely dangerous, because then obviously you become hyper vigilant, like, oh my goodness, am I going to have that symptom again? Does that mean I'm going to have a heart attack. Once I realized it wasn't a heart attack, well my next thought was, well, it must be in that case that I'm losing my mind.
So then the panic tax escalated further and I just didn't really know where to turn. And certainly when I looked in the eyes of my family, they were looking at me like, yes, no, we think you're totally mad too, And they weren't intending to be judgmental. It's just that
they didn't know what to say. So I do remember very clearly when it started, and I remember very clearly that when I finally got my hands on the right information and got into the breathing exercises and the psycho education around panic and I started to get my feet back under me, I remember very clearly thinking, I cannot believe this very simple information and these very simple exercises
aren't talked to everyone. I can't believe it took me, and you know, I'm not being able to leave home for three months in order to get here, And so I vowed that I was going to learn everything I could, and then I was going to share it as accessibly as I could once I was able to be, you know, educated enough to be able to do that qualified enough education. Now, so I hadn't heard about psychology and I got there because I thought I was going to lose my mind.
When I found out I wasn't and that this was a common experience, I thought it was time to do something about it.
That's very cool. And now you have written a Sunday Times best seller called A Manual for Being Human, But you have also you're also about to release a second book called unstuck. Five steps to break bad habits and get out of your own way. Now, in that you talk about us functioning on autopilot, So give us a sense of how much of our behaviors are automated and why is that?
So it's a scary amount. I'm giving you that as my warning shot because I think when people find out how much of their day they're not paying any attention to what they're doing, it's quite alarming. So consider your self warned, bustiness. But it's it's roughly over forty percent
of your day. Yeah, So if you imagine that you're awake for sixteen hours maybe of your day and over forty percent, let's make it just under fifty percent of that, right, So let's say between seven and eight hours of that you have no control over your behavior. You're simply acting as if you're kind of a train on train tracks, just repeating the same automated patterns. That's quite scary. Imagine sleepwalking through forty to fifty percent of your life. That's
not something I want to do. And I think the thing that makes it particularly concerning or interesting maybe is that our habits, the part of the reason we're not aware about them. Isn't just because they're automatic or unconscious. Is because we often think we're choosing them. So let's say you wake up in the morning, you think, well, I'd really love a cup of coffee. You think I've
chosen to have this cup of coffee. You think that was the decision you made, But actually you woke up in the morning and the first queue of for example, turning your alarm clock off, the first internal queue of tiredness, right, or the first clue of thinking I'm going to get out of bed, that triggered the craving for coffee, which triggered the automatic behavior of going to get it, and then the reward of drinking it stopped the habit loop.
So it's a large amount of time. We often believe we're choosing the things that we are not choosing, and there's a very good reason we do it. But unless we get aware and back in the driver's seat of our life, we might miss a lot of it. So I feel like there was a second question.
Oh, it was really about why. So now we can dig into the process of habit formation, you know, the amazing amount of stuff that comes at our brains and why it wants to have shortcuts. So educator our listeners on that a little bit.
Well, there's an idea that without habits we would only get one or two things done per day, which is just so wild unacceptable to think about. Now, you know, we almost bathe our identity on our productivity. So habits ensure that you are able to act out multiple skills at the same time without giving it that much brain energy. So if you remember when you first can you drive a car? I can, Okay, when you first got in
that car. Do you remember your first lesson or any of them where you were told So you're going to reach for the stick, You're going to have your hands on the driving wheel. You're also going to be going forward. You're also going to be looking for people in case they step out into the street, and you're going to be looking for signs, and you're going to be looking
for traffic lights. You were conducting so many tasks at the same time that I'm imagining you were left feeling a bit bamboozled and also tired.
Yes, and gripping the steering whil and thinking you're going so far. And it's interesting to talk about that, Sophie, because my little girl I keep calling the little girl which is seventeen years old and almost a stalls me. But she is learning to drive right now, and it is interesting at the start watching her drive and they and seeing her drive now and throw under the bus. She didn't even have a stick to contend with, right because everybody drives a bloody automatic over here.
Oh my goodness. So as a British person, I obviously learned manual, so I know what you're talking about. And it is different because you grip the steering wheel. And my thing actually was that anytime I'd go to change gear, steering wheel would veer towards the direction of the gear stick. Because you're concentrating on so many things at once, your
brain is running parallel tasks at the same time. So what your brain does is it creates a neural pathway that joins up every single activity that you need to do whilst driving to create one seamless pathway that when you get in the car, that pathway simply runs without you needing to think about doing anything at all. That's why you go from gripping the steering wheel to be able to have a conversation with someone else in the car. Yeah, and why now consolidate tasks?
Sorry I was going to say, and why ni you can end up somewhere and not remember actually getting there in the car right?
Yes, oh my goodness exactly, because your brain is just playing out the tasks it knows it needs to do. And so so we have habits in order to ensure that we have brain space to focus on what's important. So off our ancestors, it might have been they could make their hunting tasks habitual, which would mean that then they didn't have to focus as much on hunting, but could free up space in order to think, am I now in danger? What else do I need to be able to focus on at the same time. So there's
a very good reason we have habits. It's just that now, especially in a world that is constantly fighting for our attention, and that makes a lot of money off your habits involving looking at their stuff, so for example Instagram, any other social media, we are under kind of our tension is under constant threat, and our habit loops are being constantly triggered, and we are losing more of our time to our habits than perhaps any generation before us.
Yeah. Absolutely, and I think what a lot of people don't realize is behind all of these social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, all that there are, there's an army of behavioral scientists who are working out and optimizing how to hack into your brain and to make you want more and more and more and more and more. And it's all based
on euroscience, right, all of that stuff. A lot of these guys went through bj Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab, where he was the first guy that I actually was aware of to talk about the science of creating habits. So tell me this then, and why do those people continue to do habits even though they know they're not helpful? But you just kind of find yourself getting so into that. Why do we get stuck in your language?
So, I mean, there's multiple reasons. One is because we're simply not aware of which of our behaviors are habits. The second is because even when we decide to change a habit, we often only assume there's one queue for that habit. So we might let's say, for example, you want to stop smoking, you might assume that you only smoke when you are in a social situation, or you might decide that you only smoke when you're stressed, so
you might. Knowing the science of habit, which involves Q craving action reward, you might very cleverly decide, so I'll remove the cues that I know are an issue, so I'll tackle my stress in a different way. Or you know, some people fiddle with pencils instead of yes, or I'll hang out with my friends who I don't smoke, who don't smoke. They tackle two cues, but there might be a hundred other cues that they've not even thought about. Seeing. Something long and stick like might be a que deserving
a reward, might be a queue. So another reason that we continue with habits is we don't get savvy to the amount of cues that are triggering our behavior. The next is we assume willpower is enough. Now, the issue about willpower is that we used to think that willpower was almost like petrol in a car tank, that you had a finite amount each day, and the more you used it, the more it ran out, and by the end of the day, if you are tired, the willpower
is gone. Actually, we know willpower doesn't quite work like that, or motivation as well, doesn't quite work like that. It's more like an emotion. It comes and goes, and when it's there you should take it. And when it's gone you have to rely on other factors. And if you don't believe you have it, you're less likely to have it. So people rely too much on willpower. They don't make a plan as to how they're changed their habits. And the next thing is, it's not that this is not
anyone's fault. Very few people really understand how to leverage their biology and the science habit in order to make behavioral change.
Now as you're talking about the science of biology, so I know a reasonable amount about habits, having talked about behavior change a lot in my corporate work, however, and the surprising thing that I read are one of the cool things I read in europook was about the importance of the time of day. So talk to us about that, and then how we can leverage that time of day if we are wanting to create new habits, or can we use it as well to break old habits.
So it's this is quite interesting because so far to date I haven't seen a book on There are some brilliant books on habits out there, so atomic habits is exceptional. For example, but to date, I haven't seen a book that's written about this biology because it's come out more recently than a lot.
Of the books.
So what we know is that are kind of internal neurochemistry, So the chemicals in our brain in the first eight hours of waking are set up in such a way that we're more likely to be able to overcome friction. So friction in the habit world, there's any time when you go, oh, I don't really know if I want to do that, or oh, there's lots of excuses why I wouldn't do that. So in the morning, we have
more neurochemicals that help us push through that friction. After the first eight hours, our neurochemistry changes and it starts to settle. We're in a more relaxed state in it. Hopefully in the last eight hours we're sound asleep. So this pattern, this pattern isn't really applicable if you're a night worker, but for the rest of us, this is really important to know. So when it comes to habits, what we're talking about is anything that's new, anything that's challenging,
anything that's active. You want to slot that into the first eight hours of the day because this is when your biochemistry is going to actually help you get through the things that in the afternoon you might be like, yeah, can't mothers do that? Then in the afternoon noon, that's when you want to slip in anything that's an old habit, or anything that's soothing. So this might be yoga, meditation, yoga, nidra, so anything that's new and challenging.
Alcohol soothing, chocolate ice cream is soothing.
Also for most people, those aren't new habits, so they'll happen at any type of day. If you're wanting to add a new a new habit, the hard ones, the kind of exert exerting ones, put them in the morning, but the soothing ones and anything that's an old habit in the afternoon. Now, once something is a habit, once you've got it kind of off pat when you don't have to think about it, it can actually happen in any time of the day. So there's an important thing here.
People often decide, I know, if I want to change my habit, I've got to really plant into my diect This is true, but they often then think, well, I should do it at nine am every day. Our brain doesn't really work like that. Nine am comes and goes. The best thing to do is to decide I'll do it in the first eight hours. And then what you want to do is you want to stack it onto an old habit habit right, so yeah, yes, yes, so you know about this, yes, yeah, I call them if
they and behaviors great exactly. So let's say, for example, you want to start running in the morning. I mean, that sounds absolutely bananas to me because I hate running, but let's go with that. Let's go with that. And you want to do the first thing. So let's say every morning you always get up, you always brush your teeth. Now, the first thing you'd want to do is at the night before you put your running gear. So it's the
first thing you see when you get up in the morning. Yeah, So when I wake up, I get out of bed, I put on my running gear, because the first habit is getting out of bed. Then I walk to the sink and I brush my teeth as normal. Then I go out of the door and I run for five minutes. Then when I get back, I complete my normal tasks. So you always get up, you always brush your teeth, and you tack onto the middle section of each one.
The activity so putting on your running gear, which is already cute because you've already laid out next to your bed, so you see it, you know what you're meant to do. And then the final bit is tacked onto brushing your teeth. So yeah, if I get up, then I put my clothes on, So stack it in, but put it in your first eight hours. But don't fall into the trap of saying I'm going to do this every day at nine mm.
Yeah cool. And is there any other way to help sort of consolidate that habit in memory or is there are there any other tricks that we can use to help if we're doing the If then is there anything else to creating that habit and trying to lock it in?
Oh my god, there's hundreds, but I'm going to so as not to make it complicated, I'll often have it. Protocols are so complicated that become overwhelming, So some of the obvious ones are in advance. Find out why you want to do this activity. Often we do things because someone else has told us to. We're less likely to stay motivated if it's because we're trying to achieve something
that someone else wants. So work out who you want to be in the future, work out what habits will take you towards that person, and choose that habit rather than the one you've been told to do.
So that's firsting.
Second thing that's really simple is habits become our mortie. Habits are more likely to stick if we focus on an instigation habit rather than the execution part of the habit. Now, what this means is it's more important that you initiate the habit than what you do during the routine. So let's say, for example, I'm going to stick with exercise. Can you tell I have an exercise this week, and all I'm thinking about is the fact that I should
have gone to the gym. So if you want a daily gym habit, it is more important that you set up multiple cues in your house that will get you to the gym and you do your habit stacking or whatever it is your routine to go to the gym. It's more important that you initiate going to the gym every single day than it is to focus on what you do once you get to the gym.
Yeah, very cool, very cool. And I like the having multiple cues because right now in my office I look behind me. I have clubbils there, I have a kettle bail there, and I have dipstition there. Right, And then you go into my living room. There's a TRX hanging off the wall. In our living room, there's kettlebells in the corner. There's even a frigging rowing machine in there. Right. There are exercise cues all round this heights.
I love this. I love this because what people often don't realize, as we were saying before, is once you've done something for a while, it has more and more cues. They are gathered along the time, along the way, and often it's just the sight of one of those cues that makes you go, oh, yes, I meant to do
this thing now, that's really really good. And so you want to focus on who you want to be repeating the same action, the instigation habit, and then afterwards what you want is to be thinking, how am I going to reward myself for this activity? And I need to do as quickly, but I need to do it intermittently. So we also gain habits faster if the reward doesn't happen every single time.
So you know when you're scrolling dopamine, right, yes, exactly, predictaary, yes exactly. So one thing you could do is you do your habit with your friend, which leads to accountability, and then you take it in terms to decide who's going to decide this week if there's going to be a reward and what the reward is, and you're not going to tell each other nice or the other thing is to flip a coin after your activity, do I
get your reward or don't I get your reward? And this intermittent pattern is going to make you look more like foster a habit. But I have to say, none of this matters if you're not repeating the behavior. The single fastest way to your habit isn't how many hours you spend doing it, it's how many times you initiate it and repeat it.
Yeah. Nice, I like that because it's about heavy and learning in the brain, isn't it, neuve? Sales that fire together wire together so frequent, see is really really key? That that's awesome. And I love the way that you threw in a bit of self determination theory in there
and finding your own reasons why it's important. This is what I often say to people is that that don't be doing stuff for other people, right, It's like, you've got to find your own reasons why it's important to you and not to anybody else.
But also not just because it's nice. It's not. I don't just say this as in like, oh, find your path, find your truth. I say this because when we're doing something for someone else, we always self sabotage that that intention, Right, We're like, why am I not doing this thing? It's like because part of you, know, is you really don't want to. So you're getting in your own way.
Oh, and we're going to we are going to talk about getting in your own way. And look, I know you could talk for habits for ages and so and so could I because it's a really interesting topic. But there's so much other cool stuff in your book that I just want to give people a little taste of. So let's talk about heuristics, right, what the hell are they? Why do we have them? And give people some examples so that they can impress their friends today by talking about heuristics.
So, heuristics is just a really fancy word for a mental shortcut. So, as you were saying before, we're bombarded by information all of the time, and so our brain had to develop a way in which it could make decisions very quickly with a very small amount of information. So one really oversimplified way of describing a heuristic is it's your gut instinct. So you know, if you walk into a bar and it feels dodgy in a few
of those, there you go, me too, me too. That gut instinct is your brain is used used pattern recognition to very quickly say something is wrong and you leave that building without asking questions.
It's really interesting Starry to jump in here, but there's really really interesting research on people like fireman and first respond other first responders that just have a sense that something is wrong and say, everybody needs to get the hell out of here, and then the whole building collapses. Right, And that's just all of that information that has been non consciously processed and held in the brain and in it just recognizes patterns right exactly.
The fireman example is amazing. So it's happened so many times. Fireman will say everyone evacuates. Someone will say why, and I'll say, I can't tell you why. I just know something's wrong. So it's a gut instinct that happens before you're consciously aware, and some of the really common ones that often we don't realize are happening are things like
social proof and group think. So social proof and group think are shortcuts that will tell you your brain, really because it's outside of your consciousness, that the right thing to do is the thing that other people think is right to do. It's the things. And with groupthink, it's saying I will ignore my own views because the group is likely to be right, and sometimes that will extend to I will then quiet anyone who disagrees.
With the truth.
So social proof and group think are things we see all the time on social media. It's why we want to buy what influences sell.
Yeah. And also then when we're living in the echo chamber in social media, right when it's serving us up the content that it thinks that we want to see, we get really sucked into that. Social proof and group think.
Right one and another mental shortcut is confirmation bias. So the idea that our brain will only look for the information that proves its own beliefs to be right, but then will also interpret everything that you've been told as proof that you're.
Righty, we justify our own thinking. Are we were just constantly looking for evidence that what we believe is right.
Yes, exactly, And another one that's really quite alarming on that front, but it's actually day to day just quite normal and fine. Is illusory superiority. So the fact that more than well most of us will assume we're better than average at almost everything we do. So of drivers believe that they're above average drivers, which is just statistically impossible.
So if you consider that our kind of day to day decision making isn't generally us making rational, well thought out decisions, but is our brain shortcutting those decisions by saying, what do other people think? What that person said likely just confirms what I said to be true, And of course I'm right, because I'm pretty much smarter than everyone else. You can see how you can see how quickly our
thinking gets derailed. And I know you know, I'm obviously giving you three of there's over one hundred of these touristics, but they happen in such a split second, much like walking into the bar and getting that gut feeling of walking out that whether they have a large impact on your life or not, this is happening any moment that you're awake, so can quickly derail a very logical thought process into you making decisions that actually have no link to the person you want to be in the future,
getting you very stuck.
That's really interesting. Something else that can get you stuck. And I love that. I saw this in your book, hyperbolic discounting or temporal discounting. Talk to us about that what that because it's so important that people understand that. Right. It explains everything from why we don't exercise to why we don't see it enough for retirement. And so talk to us about what that stuff is and high influences our decisions.
Yeah, so I'm going to go back to our ancestors first. So almost everything we've discussed has a reason in terms of keeping us as alive as a species. So hyperbolic or temporal discounting is the idea that we choose the thing that is right in front of us rather than the thing that could happen in the future, even if the thing that happens in the future is better for us. So this makes sense when it comes to our ancestors. Imagine our ancestors came across a skinny little deer or
a few berries on a bush. It makes sense. It makes sense that they kill that skinny deer and eat those berries now, rather than waiting for the deer to fatten up and maybe have a family, or for that small, tiny, rubbish little bush to grow into a massive one, because they may not be around in that amount of time later, you know what I mean, like a few weeks later, a few months later, or a year later. So take what you have now because you might not be around later.
Do so.
That makes sense for our ancestors, But what does that mean for your anna?
I now?
It means that when we think.
Well, I could save this amount of money that I'm about to spend on this thing such as dinner right now or this outfit, I could add that to my pension and use that later in life when it would be really important to keep it for. But instead, no, no, I'm going to buy that thing that I have right in front of me right now. It means we buy the fancy dinner or the outfit that we couldn't afford.
In terms of going to the gym, it means we choose to sit on the sofa or like to eat the yummy thing that's in front of us, rather than say, you know what I'm going to save that until after I get back to the gym. We will always choose the quick win over long term game.
And really interesting study by I think it's hal Halzburg. I can't remember his surname, but it was basically a real life experiment with Americans who had the first job or they were getting a job, and they had to choose. I think it's called the canine in America over here at super anniation, but we have to mandatory you have to pay some of your salary goes into that. In America,
they choose how much they do it. And he did this really cool experiment where he got a bunch of people and they were wearing VR technology, so they saw an avatar of themselves actually filling out the form. And some of those people saw an avatar of themselves as they look today, and some of those people saw an avatar they'd aids the avatar. So it was in their sixties and the people and these were real life decisions. The people who viewed saw themselves as in their sixties.
Making the decision put more than double the amount of their pay into their retirement fund. Right, so we can actually manipulate that for the good that was pretty cool shit and really shows how we are influenced by this hyperbolic discounting.
Yeah, and I think the earliest study was something like if I give you ten pounds now or one hundred ten pounds in a year, which will you take? And people like, oh, ten pounds now, but like, logically that doesn't make sense. You'll get one hundred and ten pounds in a year. It doesn't make any sense, but it feels like it makes sense to us. It's like, well, I just want ten pounds now, I might not.
Burd in hand in the bush, right.
Yeah, although in a year's time it doesn't feel like that. You're like, oh, I really want.
It to exactly now. I like to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. Let's talk about self sabotage. Why the hell do we do what is under the hood whenever we are self sabotaged, because there will be so many people listening there as going that's me. I'm a self sabotager. I get so close and then I just screw everything up. What's going on there?
Safety seeking it's the shortest answer to that question. So essentially, self sabotage, I think often comes across as this kind of willing destruction of our own life. But actually it's it's something that most of us do because either we fear failure, we fear rejection, we think that there's only a certain amount of happiness that we're meant to have in our life, or we fear success. So I'm going
to give you a fun little story. I just before I was finishing my first book, Like literally, i'd written ninety five percent of this book. I didn't have much left to do. I suddenly just stopped working on it. I really mean it, like I just couldn't make myself to that. I was so close to the finish line, and I painted my entire house, my entire house, I mean what my house did not I don't own it. I'm a renter, right am I painting someone else's house. I was just so motivated to do it. It was
really compelling. And then I found some other projects to do. You know how it goes anyway, So, because most people talk about self sabotage as being a form of protection against fear of failure, So in other words, if I don't try, then I can't fail and no one will laugh at me. At first, I thought, oh, maybe I've given up because I'm scared it's going.
To be bad.
And I was like, yeah, maybe that sounds about right, but it doesn't really fit. And I realized that in the UK we have something and I'm pretty sure you have this. In Australia we have tall poppy syndrome.
You get much stronger here. The force is strong. Oh really? Oh yeah, a stronger than the UK.
Okay, so you're gonna know what I'm talking about, right, So the idea if any poppy grows too tall, we must cut it down to size. Okay. So that's one of the many things that kind of told me early on. You must not get too big for your boots. You must not stand out, you must not go further than you are expected to go, because if you put yourself out there, someone is going to take you down. So what happened to avoid being taken down? I just stopped working.
It was too frightening. The idea of finishing it. And I don't mean the idea of finishing it and it being a glowing success. I just mean finishing it and saying, my friends, so I've written a book suddenly felt too threatening, like ooh, who does she think? She is little misauthor over there, so I just stopped writing. So self sabotage is anything that we do to keep ourselves within our comfort zone, but there are many reasons that we do it, and the way that we move forward is kind of
too pronged. It is figuring out what it is that we're trying to avoid and tackling that kind of emotional state. So, right, if I'm afraid, what do I do in order to soothe myself? How do I kind of look after myself should that worst thing happen? And what do I need to do right now? And the other prong is doing behavioral experiments? So okay, what do I need to do in order to be able to test out my fear? So is it I need to say? Okay, what if I did put my book out there and everyone did
shame me? What would I do?
Then?
Well, probably say to my friends, that's not very nice. I've worked really hard. Hopefully actually most of my friends wouldn't be like that, because that's not really what friends do. You know what I mean? I created a plan of attack for should the work happened, and then I just broke my task down into the smallest steps. I was like, so, can I sit down and write for five hundred words today? Yes, I can do that, And I just kept building from there and facing my fear, but in the smallest and
most manageable ways. You mentioned fog earlier. He said, if you're wanting to set up a habit basically floss one tooth day, that's right. He said it in a much more eloquent way. But that's kind of how I tackle self sabotage, right. It's like, so what is the one tooth? Yeah, if I can sit down and write five hundred words, I can do that, and you build from there until you've done the whole set of teeth. And you've already tackled the emotional side. So you've kind of too prong approach.
What do I do to manage emotionally? And what do I do to manage physically? And you put one front of foot in front of the other until you get it done.
Yeah, that's it. And one of the things actually I've been talking to my daughter has jumped onto this like she's a nerd, she's a swat, and then sometimes she's she's just the motivation drops side and she's she comes and goes dad, I'm really not motivated today. And I said, that's fine, why don't you just do ten minutes? Say a Lauren, do ten minutes and that's it. And she's jumped onto this, so she DENI that she's not motivated. She just goes, I'm just going to go to ten
minutes and that's it. And sometimes that ten minutes is ten minutes. But sometimes it just rolls. Right. This is what a lot of people don't realize. Motivation follows action, not the other way around.
Exactly one hundred percent. And also, if we now tie that back to habits, what you're doing so brilliantly there is you're enforcing an instigation habit, right, So it doesn't matter what you do once you sit down, as long as you sit down and start. And if you do that every day, even if you just sit down for five minutes. Now what happens every time you think I can't do it? The habit of actually I could do five minutes becomes a pattern that stays with you for life.
And I do have to say, you know, sometimes when talking on podcasts or simplifying things in blogs or talking on kind of short form on Instagram, we can make quite complex things sound like they're very very easy to do. Yeah, and you know, facing self sabotage, like when I was genuinely afraid. I was genuinely afraid, and I did turn it around quite quickly. But I just really want to stress to listeners that well, and it sounds like we're making life of quite complicated things. I do know that
it can be more complex than this. And also the reason I wrote like a three hundred page book on this is because sometimes we need a little bit more than what we're talking about now, a little bit more support, a little bit more guidance.
Yeah, And for anybody who's interesting, is you do a whole thing on the self sabotaged cycle and what we can do about it. So I will direct people to your book. But I love this the instigation habits. I'm a massive fan of that, although I wasn't even aware of the technology, sorry, of the of the preeseology. So often I'll say to people, you know, if you don't
want to go for a run, that's fine. You know, you've said I'm going to go for a run, and going to go for a run, and then you wake up in the morning and you're like, I do not want to go for a run. I just don't have the motivation. And I say, that's cool, you don't have to, but you do have to put your exercise gear on and walk to the and that's it. And he walked to the gate. He can come back in and that's absolutely fine. And sometimes you will come back in and sometimes you'll
go you know what, I'm bloody well there. I like little things like enabling habits, which are kind of instigation habits but then have a flow on effect. So I have this rule that whenever I come back from work and I put on my exercise gear right. So last night I flew back from Canberra, I emailed you as the plane touched on the tarmac, i'd send an email
to you with with just about this morning. And that was about half past nine, and so I didn't get back until nearly eleven o'clock and I was going to go straight to bed, and I found myself. I got home and I put on my exercise gear right. It's like, why why the hell am I doing that? It's just it was just it's locked into my brain. And the reason I started doing that is, if you you know, I talk to audiences all the time when they come
on from work. The amount of people who put the pajamas on is just crazy, right, And I said, well, what's the priming in your brain? Right, you put your pajamas on. Their priming is sit on the sofa, have a glass of wine.
Yeah, or walk in, turn the TV on, you know, walk in and be like, oh, thank god, I'm here, and your home becomes associated just with sleep. And you know, obviously there's no problem with any of these activities if they're what you truly value in life and that's what you want. If that's not what you want, we need to be kind of setting up our homes. And I love that you have this exercise gear on the moment you come in. You need to be setting up those cues.
Please don't rely on will parallel Like, yeah, your environment shapes what you do. So make that house a little bit less cozy if you need to.
Yeah, that's right. And take the ship food out of the house. Stop telling yourself that it's for your children. Don't need it. It's for you and you don't need it either, right, and.
Stop working in bed. I think I'm telling myself this, stop working in bed, because then your bed becomes associated with being awake. Right, everything around you is a queue.
Yeah, that bird one is critical. And when I talk about sleep hygiene, I say, a really important thing is that your brilliant needs to know that your bedroom is a sleep sanctuary, is where you go to sleep, and if you're lucky, you get a bit of boostie macgoofty every nine and then right. But it's not for television's, laptops and mobile phones.
I've never heard of femagogli in my whole life. Oh my god, that was amazing. Exactly, people, exactly, this is very, very true. And again this is where those kind of permissive cognitions come in. You know those thoughts that go, oh, well, how bad is it this time? And it's true, watching like doing a piece of work in your admissive cognition.
I love that.
Yeah, I don't think I've made that up. I don't think I've made that up. That sounds like too fancy a word for me to have generated myself. I think it is the technical term for basically just a thought that gives you permission when you know you really shouldn't. Like a single permissive cognition is no big deal. But what happens well the next time that will nothing really changed the last time I worked in bed? How about can it be? And suddenly you start laying down habits
without realizing. So yeah, right, you have mcgufty and sleep in bed people.
That's it exactly. Now let's talk about self esteem. So you talk about self esteem and boosting our self esteem in a healthy way. And so for me, there's a little bit of a thin line to walk here, because you know, we've had twenty years of boosterism of self esteem that did not work out well. That Chimerdi and United State. It's telling me, you know, you're awesome, you
can be anything you want to be, and all this stuff. Right, So let's let's separate that false boosterism from people who really their self esteem is giving in their way and they need a cop of the little subtle techniques for just lifting it to a normal, reasonable level, not boosting it into this unrealistic stratosphere.
Well, so firstly, I'd love to say that those kind of very exciting bumper sticker kind of your brilliant taglines often get us really stuck because we might try and believe them in our head, but if we don't believe them in our heart. We're constantly in conflict of feeling like that doesn't feel true. But I'm meant to say, oh God, am I failing? Am I failing? Am I failing? So that's the first thing. Second thing is I don't know if many people really truly understand what self esteem is.
It's the value you place on yourself, It's your worth. People often confuse it with self confidence. So self confidence is how much you believe in your ability in a certain area. So I am confident as a psychologist, Yes, I'm confident that I can show up to a therapy session and pretty much always know what I'm going to do, or if I don't know the solution, I will pretty much find a way. Because I've been doing this for
a long time. I'm confident in my skill I as a person, and not necessarily confident in who I am all the time. I don't struck down the street and so amazing, because that's a different thing. So our worth is based, yes, partly on our confidence. So if you feel like you're able to navigate most scenarios, even if they're scary, that's going to boost your self esteem. But there are other aspects of self esteem which include belonging. So if you're struggling with your self esteem, look at
who's around you. Are there enough people around you who when you look in their eyes, they reflect back at you that they think that you're pretty great as you are. You know a lot of these Instagram posts will say who cares what other people think? And I think that's a really nice idea and if you're able to get there, brilliant. But actually, our real core sense of do I belong is partly derived from seeing in other people's eyes that they think that we matter, So we've got confidence working
on certain skills. Belonging ensuring you're surrounded by a community of people. It doesn't matter the number of people, it matters the quality of the connections, So folks on belonging. The next one is identity. So often if you imagine your identity being like a jigsaw puzzle, often what happens is work for many of us, not everyone becomes the single piece of the puzzle. This means, if work isn't going well, do you imagine that puzzle piece suddenly missing
or being destabilized. There's a massive whole or a shakiness in your identity. So this is where It's a really good place to do a values assessment. Figure out what's important in your life, and there's lots of values sheets online to do this. Also shameless plug in a Manner for Being Human and in my new book and Stuck. Figure out what you value and make sure you engage in activities that cover each of the main areas of
your identity. So you feel like you're really engaging in valued activities, I feel like you really know who you are. So these are kind of three of the places that I would start.
Yeah, that and really sorry, I just stay to step in right here. That is the most comprehensive, brilliant explanation I've ever heard around self esteem. That is just gold. Okay, so continue with what you were going to say.
I know all I was going to say is putting on address that you love might make you feel one thousand dollars a million dollars for like five minutes, but it's this other stuff that will make you feel like you're worthy for the rest of your life. So I'm not saying don't focus on the kind of frills, the fun fripperies, but really working on these core aspects of identity, belonging and building up skills that you know that you
can cope in life. That is a foundation will take you through your life in a way that you would never imagine. But there's many other things, so you know, it's just a starting point.
But a really good starting point. And I think if we just look at that belonging, I mean Richard Ran and ed DC who creates self determination theory, they talked about the three basic human needs, and relatedness is one. In fact, you touched on two of them, right, relatedness and competence or mastering. Right, So having some of those skills, but that being a member of a tribe. We are a tribal species, and one of the worst things for your health is loneliness. Right, we have to be connected
into people. And I think you put it beautifully is being with people who actually value you is really important. And just stop hanging out with the p people who are constantly criticizing you or undermining your self worth, because especially if they're close to you, Oh my god, that can just destroy people right one.
And you know, sometimes we can't get away from those people. Let's say your boss is a micromanager. You might actually have to find a way to rubble along with them. But in that situation way, oh yeah, if you can. This comes from a doctor, Sophie bought no, no, no, no no. What I was going to say is sometimes you can't cut those people out, and in that scenario, what I would really recommend is just making sure that in your
social life you're kind of joining communities, joining clubs. Maybe, for example, we're going to go back to exercise purely because we've mentioned it so much. If you want to go, like if you love hiking, if you love running, is there a community that you live near that you could go and do that once a week with other people you know people. It's amazing how difficult I think people find it to make friends, especially post pandemic and especially
once people kind of cross a certain age group. But actually, you know, online there's things like meetup dot com where they where they'll tell you what is going on in your community. And the beauty of doing activities together is that you get to do something side by side. So if you're feeling anxious or you're not sure about your social skills, and the idea of sitting with someone looking them in the eyes, kind of having to feel like you have to come up with something witty and scintillating
for an hour feels overwhelming. Doing an activity like walking next to each other or sewing, or even going to the cinema or going to look at art side by side with someone not only gives you a focus points outside of your head, but it gives you something to talk about afterwards.
Yeah, that's very cool. And actually you mentioned side by side. A really interesting little fun fact that I came across recently is that females and when they are getting into relationships and tend to do fierce to fierce interactions. So we'll sit down over coffee, we're below, it's much more side by side. So it's standing watching something talking having conversations when they're side by side, and teenagers will open up much more side by side, right out for a walk,
driving in the car. How many people have noticed that their teenagers talk a little bit more when they're sitting there. So it's that side shoulder to shoulder stuff can be really really valuable as well in terms of a communication too.
It's the best. Yeah, it's the best.
Okay, now you talk. Also, you've got this really cool thing. You got so much cool stuff in your book, But do you talk about this drama triangle, which is really cool. So talk us through the drama triangle. What is it and why is it relevant in our lives?
So Steve Carptman gosh I but it his name is. Then Steve Carpman came up with this. It's not mine, but it's to oversimplify it. It's this idea that we often take up repeated roles in our lives, particularly during conflict, where we either assume the kind of victim, rescuer or persecutor position. It's the pattern that we see in almost every fairy tale. It's the pattern we see in almost
every movie. So in oversimplified terms, let's say a little red riding Hood, her grandmother, the wolf, and the huntsman. So little red Wolf is the victim because she obviously gets eaten, so is the grandma. The wolf is obviously the persecutor, and the huntsman who comes in and chops the wolf up and somehow rescues the still living red riding Hood and grandma from the tummy of the wolf is the rescuer. So this is a triangle. It's a pattern that we know. It's as tale as old as time.
But in our relationships The reason it's a problem is because it rarely means that we tackle our conflict head on. Okay, So let's say, for example, you're in a couple and when you have friends over for dinner, you tend to fight, and then another person steps in to rescue you. Yes, one of you in the couple is the victim. The other person is probably seen to be the persecutor probably both of you think you're the victim. The friend steps in. Now, if this happens once or twice, that's not really a
big deal. It can be helpful to have a friend kind of interrupt an argument. But if over time this relationship becomes reliant on a third person rescuing them, it means that the couple actually never faces their conflicts together and adaptively works through them. Now kind of something that many of the people I know really identify with.
Is.
Another example is people who are drawn to the rescuer role. Now, every therapist is drawn to the rescue role. Often think they're being helpful. They see someone they're like, oh, my goodness, I need to step in help. So they make the other person the victim, whether the other person was asking for help or not. It's like, oh, they need my help.
Then they go in and they they tend to over offer help, right And sometimes when we help someone in a way that's realistic, we say, do you actually want help? What would you like me to support you with? How would you like me to support you? And then the two of you work together on a solution that builds the other person up so that in the future they can tackle the problem themselves. When we're in rescue a role, we treat everyone as if they're disempowered, as if they're
unable to figure out a solution for themselves. We then step in do things for them, creating a cycle in which that person becomes continuously more disempowered and you feel more and more like I am such a good person. But and this is the final thing I want to say, which is irrespective of the position you're drawn to, and believe me, at any time of day, we can slip into persecutor a victim, or rescuer. Even though we're drawn to one role, we all occasionally become that person who
criticizes the other. We all become the person that thinks they need to change them, not me. Irrespective of the role that you start out in, everyone ends up feeling like the victim. So the rescuer who says, oh, let me help you. At some point, if the victim says no thanks or yeah, the idea you gave me wouldn't work, then the rescuer goes, well, I was only trying to help, feeling like I can't believe they drew me into their drama and now they're not listening.
Right.
The drama triangle draws us into familiar patterns, It stops us from tackling the actual issue at hand, and it leaves everyone who plays the game feeling like they're the one that's hard done to.
Yeah, very interesting. Look, as you were telling that story, it's kind of linked to this, not directly, but it was about people not being left alone to sort it out themselves. Right. And I'll tell you a little story. When I was back in the military in the UK, I've just flying helicopters and we were going on an embarkation for I think it was six weeks and you fly in cruise, so there was going to be a number of crews on there. I think there was four crews anyway, And when you go to see with each
other and the pilots, the backseater mean and navigator. You sleep together, you eat together, you fly together, you live in each other's pockets. Right. There were two pilots out of eight who detested each other, right, And they were both thinking, shit, was a reasonable chance that we are going to be crewed up here and we are going to be living in each other's pockets for the next
six weeks. So they both they had a quick chat, even though they didn't like each other, and they both independently went to the senior pilot and PERSONNE who will rename me, and they said, Boss, I don't really get on with person B. I'd prefer if you don't crew me up with them. And then person B went in and said the same thing about PERSONAE. The senior pilot listened to them both and then brought them both into the room and sat them down and said the personally,
how long have you got left in the squadron? And they said some like fifteen months in Person B said, they asked, and he said eighteen months. And he said, you two fuckers are going to be flying together every single day for the next fifteen months. Go and sort your shit out. There is no room for egos. This is a team, right, And that was it. They were just crewed up forever and ever brilliant way to shortcut that right, right.
And it's interesting because every conflict or pattern we get into in our life won't necessarily be helped by exactly the same solution.
Right.
So let's say you, for example, you have a warring partnership, so the same situation. Let's say let's go really heteronormative, like a husband and wife and they hate each other. The solution may not be in that situation, just go away and sort it out, but correct situation. But there are other scenarios in which what you're talking about is absolutely perfect because what the boss decided I did to do there was like, I see your drama. I see you're trying to drag me into some kind of triangle.
And instead of playing the game, and instead of allowing gossip to happen, and instead of you're relying on me fixing your problems, I'm going to sit here and the three of us are going to talk like adults. So it's wonderful when I hear things like that, and you hear that it worked out, You're just like, yes, you
notice the drama. You decided not to get involved and you sorted it, and you know, I assume that had it not have worked out, let's say six months later or a month later, even if it had become untenable, then you think of another solution. But having conversations out in the open is almost always the best way.
Yeah. Yeah, And this is the extreme circumstances, right, because these people might have to go to war with each other. Right, So that is an extreme and so it's certainly not what I was suggesting for everybody to do. Now, let's not talk about the importance. You write about the importance of historical grips. So what are they and how did they influence? Just give us a couple of examples.
Okay, so this is I don't want it, do you to imagine that everything that you learned as a child is going to dictate what you do as an adult. But generally, when you came into the world, you learned what you were meant to do in any given scenario by watching the people around you and how they responded. So let's say, for example, if your parents were into having others over for dinner, you will have learned what
hosting looked like based on how they hosted. Everyone else let's say, for example, your parents had affairs when things got stressful, you learned when things get stressful, you sleep with other people. So if you imagine, if you imagine that you're kind of writing down a script that says, when X happens, I do why. This is one way of conceptualizing how family scripts family behaviors are past generation
to generation. Now, obviously I don't want to underplay individual differences DNA the fact that lots of us naturally have our own ways of being. But often when we get to a certain age in our life or a certain position in our life that reminds us of something to do to our family, we enact their patents. So something that can be really useful is if you start noticing that you're doing something you don't like, is to say,
where did this start in my family tree? Did I come up with this or did someone three generations ago start drinking when they were stressed? Identifying where it came from is the first thing, because it helps give you compassion for why you're doing it self. Criticism flogging yourself isn't actually very motivating. Compassion plus responsibility that is how you make change. So intergenerational scripts dictate how you're going
to act in certain circumstances. And what's really important I think to know is we have three different kinds of scripts. We have the ones where we replicate the ones we have to generate ourselves because we simply never saw someone do it. So for example, when tech came out, you know, like like proper iPhones, like there's no playbook, right yeah, so you just like creator in script. And then we
have corrective scripts. This is the one where you say I don't like the way my family did this, or I don't like the thing I learned, and I'm going to do something different. And it's really exciting that we can, for example, literally sit down, write down the habits we don't like, the behaviors we don't like, identify where they started in time, and decide on a new way of being. And I won't go into it now because I don't
know if we have time. But one of the really exciting things is one of the exciting things to learn is there is an issue that is we often try and overcorrect those scripts. So parents were too strict, So I'm going to be really lenient, which then leads to new issues, right, which often then leads the next generation to say, well, my parents didn't set any boundaries, so I'm going to come.
So the generation the behaviors in the beautiful patterns.
But we see it in politics. We see this over correcting everywhere. And a moment ago, I said, what's exciting and I don't really mean exciting, but what's exciting is when you think about these experiences from the position of these the scripts, sometimes we overcorrect. This is when we can realize, Okay, I can choose a new way, I can find middle ground, I can decide not to overcorrect, and I can actually make a future for the generations to come that won't lead to this kind of pendulum
swing front to back. This is how we genuinely will make change I think in the world, both politically, climate change wise, and in our kind of just like immediate family.
Yeah, yeah, I can. I can see the overcorrection playing out in some parts of society right now. But that that corrective because I as you started to talk in I was thinking about that and then you just started talking about corrective scripts. So is there some thing right? So let's take alcohol in the family or drugs in the family, and often you will see that beheave you're repeating, But then often you see somebody go the other way.
Is there something that is consistent or tangible, whether it's a personality traitor or some other thing that causes one person to replicate that behavior where the other person completely goes the other way. Is there anything consistent in here or is it a complex mix of things.
It's definitely a complex mix. It's definitely a complex mix because you can often see within the same family, siblings who were raised in the same environment by the same people, like enacting the same script, go in two completely different directions. Sometimes that's because it was a conscious choice made early in life, and other times it may be because they had enough influence, for example, outside of the family or their DNA, so their actual temperament just simply isn't wired to.
Be like that. Yeah, or maybe it's the age. And then the reason I asked that question, I've got a may Well obviously really me nameless, pretty hard upbringing parents and both drug addicts heroin addicts. He was the older brother, and he tells stories about coming home with his younger brother and having to spin his parents around in these church because they had heroin needles. Stuck out of their arms.
They both died of heroin overdoses, and my mate went on to become an officer in the British Armed Forces and his younger brother became a heroin addict who he
is constantly rescuing. So that made me think, like, is it something in somebody's personality outside in You rightly said outside influences, because often they just need that one mentor who's outside the family, right, But it also just struck me it could have been the IgE and that maturity whenever he kind of had the wherewithal to go this is wrong, or maybe the sense of responsibility that he had for his younger brother could have been one of those things, right, a number of things.
Yeah, And sibling position is really interesting in terms of the way that shapes our personality too. So it's just I find humans utterly fascinating. There are so many factors that can shape who we are and what we do.
And if we kind of go full circle to the beginning of our conversation and we realize that at the moment, maybe we're only fully present to kind of fifty something, maybe less than that percent of our lives, imagine the capability the capacity that we would have if we kind of got aware, if we decided to notice what patterns we're replicating that we do want and we don't want. If we decided, you know, I'm going to figure out
who I actually want to be. I'm going to surround myself by people who are going to support that, and I am going to create an environment that sets me up for success. How exciting would that be? It's just, you know, humans are amazing, amazing people. I'm always amazed by their capacity to survive. But yeah, sometimes we need a little bit of a nudge in the right direction.
We do, we absolutely do. And I think for anybody who is struggling wants to become a better version of themselves or are just wants to become on stuck, and I think you've got a brilliant resource. And I'm not just blowing smoke up your arse, as we used to say in Northern Ireland. It is I like to call myself a procademic. Yours your book is a true procademic book, right because it's got all the research, but it's just written in such a way that makes really good understanding.
And people just go, oh shit, oh fuck, oh that's me. Oh that's me. But what I really like about it is it's not just a here's why you do what you do your muppet, but it's also here's what you can do about it, which is what I really like it. And it's all laid out there. So I highly recommend all of the readers to go and buy Unstuck. It's going to be very soon. It's not not quite yet. I think it's next week, is it?
Yeah, next week's second of June.
Twenty second of June, next week. And you also have a book on how to be a human that you know that appeals a manual for being human? I like that, I do you know. I nearly called my book Man's called Death by Comfort, Why modern life is killing us and what we need to do about it. It was almost called a survival guide for the modern words, right, and so that manual. We all need a bit of manuals. And having a manual written by somebody who really understands
human behavior. I think that beautiful combination of psychology and neuroscience. It just makes so much sense to people. So where can people find out more about doctor sof and all of your little links?
Perfect? So I have an Instagram and it's at underscore dr sof so Underscore d R s Oph. I used to joke about who is at dr SOF. I don't know who this person is, and I still to this day don't know who they are. But I have now reached the point where I'm like, it's okay, you can
have doctor Soph. I'm fine about it. So I have an Instagram where I share mostly daily, and then my website doctor soap dot com so d R s oph dot com where you can find my newsletter sign up, and I send out bi weekly emails that include blogs
that are always procademic. I love that word. So we'll give you tangible takeaways, and it normally shares something kind of nuanced, something new, and something I always say it's nuanced new borrowed blue, so blue is normally something like a fun lu joke at the end, and the new is some kind of tipbit about something that's come out
in research that week. But it will give you some practical skills to take away and then you can double in the world of mental health productivity and just finding out who you really are.
Yeah, geezing into the abyss. Love it and doctor so thank you for taking a time of an evening, a hot, sweaty evening and lighty. Nobody's going to be able to get any sleep tonight because nobody's going to our conditioning in the UK for good reasons, and.
They've probably sold out of fans. I mean, it's just wild. It's just a wild ride of lighty right now. But anyway, thank you so much for having me on. Honestly, this was a delight now.
It was awesome, and I really love the fact that we did the whole podcast with you sitting on the floor. That's just cool.
Don't telling me what.
I will definitely have you on again at some stage at doctor self. That has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Have a lovely day.