Good to see you again, and I'm glad to see you alive.
And well, yes, indeed, man, I am out the other side, as they say, I'm happy to be out the other side.
I'm very glad to hear it. And just if you don't mind, I don't know all the backstory, but I know you had surgery, and yeah, are you okay? Is everything all right?
I am? I am perfectly fine, and I'm a very very lucky boy. I play soccer with a cardiologist and because I was I'm in my fifties, I went to him and I said, hey me, you know what can I do to get a full check up? I want the full check up, but I just don't want to go and get my bloody cholesterol measured, which is a pretty poor proxy. I want to know what my tickers like. And he's like, yet, no problem, come in when we'll
do a whole heap of testing. So he did the you know, the exercise stress test, cardiac MRI, all of that stuff, sat me down, uh, and then was taking me through the results. And when you know, fitness wise, you're great, he says, but we have just found that you have a congenital heart defect. So I was born. I was born with a bicuspid aortic valve rather than try cuspid. So you're for and for the listeners or maybe anybody doesn't know. Your aorta is the be an
artery that plumps the blood. So the blood comes out of the left ventricle, it squeezes it and it goes through the orta and through the all of your body. And and there's supposed to be a try leaf, a try cuspid valve. There three leaf thing and it's a one way valve. So the blood goes through and then the valve shuts. I was born with the heart defect
of a bicusp but so only two leaves. And what that means is over time it doesn't shut properly right, So you then start to get regurgitation, as in blood leaking back in. And what that does then over time, because there's blood leaking back in and the ventricles filling again, it can stretch your heart chamber. And as the cardiologist said to me, he says, what kind of happens with people who particularly are into their fitness. They first start to notice just a fitness is going a little bit here.
I need to work harder, and so you go and you work harder, and that makes the problem worse. Right, The other stuff can happen is that the blood pulls in the bottom and then you can get You can end up with an aneurysm, or your aorta stretches. The man was starting to stretch and it can just burst in in your brown bread. So it was either going to give me heart failure or or kill me. So I'm very lucky and I just found this morning I
was reading an article. I'm in very good company. Olympic four hundred meters silver medalist Roger Black revealed he's just had open heart surgery. Same issue, exact same issue. He was born with a by customers, but he knew about it from the age of eleven, so obviously often it's generic. Obviously one of his parents had it. He got checked out at the age of eleven. They knew it. And it's a watching weight thing until it becomes an issue, right, and you didn't.
Have any family history or anything.
I didn't know any family history at all around it, and so it's not always it can just be a freak. But then I've got to check my kids from up. Both my kids are getting checked as well, and you know, but mine was getting to the point my surgeon say it actually that I had over fifty percent regard sitation once it hits sixty percent of sixty sixty five when you get heart failure. So I'm a lucky, lucky boy.
That's absolutely incredible. And I guess a reminder to a lot of people listening who might think, do you have done the cholester I've done the blood test, but actually I've never had a real look under the hood in terms of cardiac risk. That's a huge lesson. And you didn't feel.
Anything, No, I didn't feel anything. Looking back, there were probably some signs, and you know, retrospect, you know, it's great to be able to look back on stuff, right. I've noticed just playing this year because particularly I went I played open age this year because I couldn't play with the over thirty fives, and just noticed that my speed was nowhere near like with young guys. And I
just thought, it's just because you're old. But you know, I was working with half a heart basically, so that's going to affect stuff like that. And I did actually start to notice. And when you know about these things, you more were November December, and especially January, my exercise capacity was really dropping off quite significantly, and some would say that was because I was in Belfast for two weeks reacquainting myself with Guinness, but the badness was out
by that stage. I could definitely feel it in January and my serge and said, yeah, you were now over fifty percent. So like in if I hadn't done anything about it in the next year, I would have been in trouble.
Wow. Well, I'm so glad to hear you on the other side of it.
Yeah, and look really interesting because I bumped into somebody just walking down the street. I bumped into lady I know he used to be here to hr with I select and I'd done some business with her and we were talking with her husband and he had not not the same thing, but he had ended up having cockages in his arteries and the same thing. It's us freaking blokes. He was noticing just when he was out cycling. Oh, the cold is starting to affect me. It's affected my
breathing and stuff like that. But then he said there were other symptoms. He was getting a little bit of chest pain and he just dismissed it. He even got some jaw paying and he sort of just dismissed that, and his doc said, geez, you were pretty close to a big heart attack.
Right, So got to listen to the signs, don't you. You do?
And so I think for especially for blokes because we get more cardiovascars, but not exclusively women as well. You got to know what those signs and symptoms are, right, and especially if you're noticing your exercise capacity has dropped significantly, you're breathing harder, don't always just write it off on the old age and go and get bloody well checked out. And you've got to push. You got you gotta push, right, So that's the thing. So yeah, but hey, we're on
the other side. I'm recovering really well and very happy to be here.
And your gratitude levels are high.
Oh yes, oh yes, very very high. Yeah, I'm extremely grateful for modern science from a surgeon, for all the nurses in the hospital who were freaking awesome and stuff like that. Like, yeah, gratitude levels all are through the I'm normally a person who's big on gratitude, but yeah, through the roof now. But interesting, Tom and I've had this conversation. So I don't want to go too much into it, but I had this conversation with Craig Harburn.
We're about to release a podcast. A really interesting thing for me in the lead up was using that whole stoic principle of meditating on your death. And I think a big lesson for everybody is just, you know, put yourself in that scenario, right, imagine that you are that in six months your brown bread something happens or in a month, like what would the impact be? What would the impact be on your family? Have you got your shit sorted out? But also, you know, if that was
to happen, what would your big regrets be? Right? If you were taken early and then and then imagine you've got a second chance, and what would you do with that?
Right?
Because a lot of it spen a shit little time less on their phone, bringing dooms, grueling, watching shit TV that spend more time with their family, doing hobbies, all of that stuff and why weird until you get that warning shot across the boats.
Yeah, well you know that it's a powerful question what have you done with your life? And you know, if we look at Bronnie Were's story, the top five regrets of the dying. The number one most common regrets she saw as a palliative carenurse was I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I'd let myself be happier. I wish I'd sat in touch with
my friends. Nobody said I wish I'd spent more time in mindless online social media, or getting up about someone I worked more in the week, right, yeah, And nobody said, jo, I'm glad I renovated and got the extra bedroom, or I've got the European car in the driveway. Nobody said that. It was all about relationships, doing what matters, not avoiding what's in our heart, like not, you know, having the courage. That's the word that stood out to me, the courage
to live a life true to yourself. You know, I see as a psychologist, the most common unhelpful coping strategy across the board is avoidance. We find the excuse to delay, to not take action, to not confront it. And this is as true for people's fears as it is for their goals. And so that question, if you were to die in a month or in six months, what have you done with your life? It brings everything into sharp focus.
Yeah, it really really does. And I haven't been through and done that exercise of that meditating on your death. I really encourage everybody to do it right and then to just take stock of your life, right, pretend just pretend you've got a massive second chance, Like what would you do differently? Right? Yeah, So anyway, we're not here to talk about me, so you are. Your clinical psychology has been on before. Some people will have heard you.
If you haven't, I'd highly recommend you go back. It was probably a couple of years ago actually that we were on talking about apples for the mind, and it was a great conversation. Hence your back.
Yeah, and we talked about the top five myths of mental health and I know some people just really it resonated for them, these idea that there's we're misled by this common knowledge around psychology and mental health. And I loved how much that resonated for people.
Yeah, and just I see that's just rehush. What's a couple of the big myths? Right, Just let's do a quick rehush before we get into today. What would be the big one or two that are the standouts for you.
Oh, the big one or two is being mentally healthy means I'm going to feel happy. And conversely, if I feel happy, it means I'm mentally healthy. That's a huge red herring. Equating your mood with your mental health. It leads people down the garden path. They assume that there's something wrong with them when there isn't because they're not feeling twenty four seven joy and good feelings. I've got to tell you, Paul, if I met someone who said they felt good all the time, I think, what disorder
do you have? Because it's not normal to be elevated in mood continuously. But we also see people pursuing happy feelings in unhealthy ways. They see that as the holy ground. But your mood or how you feel, is not the same thing as your mental health. It's not the same thing as your will being.
And this is critical for people to understand. Isn't it that happiness is just an emotion. It's a fleeting emotion like anger, sadness, that sort of stuff. It's not a state of being that we can be in permanently. And I think we've all been, We've been sold this by marketing people, right them, that we should all be happy. Interesting.
I remember looking at research around what parents most want for their children, and across the world there was like thirty different countries and the biggest thing they wanted for their children was to be happy. Apart from India, and they wanted their children to be successful more than happy. Right, that was the one country that bucked the trend out of thirty or forty of them. Yeah, it's just it's bullshit that we can be happy all the time, isn't it.
It is bullshit. And I think when parents say I want my child to be happy, what they really mean to say is I want them to have well being. Yeah, I want them to be well liked and I want them to be successful. That's really what they mean when they say I want them to be happy. But the good news is that and working in the air of preventive psychology, I do a lot of work with parents. We talk about what are the things to keep in mind if you're the parent of young child in order
to achieve that. Well, if you want your child to be happy, you want to cultivate well being. Because you're absolutely right, we conflate these two things. That one is a temporary mood state. Moods are by definition transient, and that is healthy. We don't they're meant to come and go. That's why I always say emotions are like the weather. They're meant to come and go. And if you want your child to be well liked, then model social skills and coach them on social skills. And if you want
them to be successful, build their capability. So you're not gonna have a capable child if they never face challenges, they never have responsibility and they don't have to do things on their own. Yeah.
Look, I want to do a big dig into that. But just while we're on that topic of happiness and that, you know we've been sold as happiness. I think there's another thing that's a big issue right now is that And I don't know where this came from, but now people just a lot of people seem to think that life is about being entertained, right, and so many people spend so much of their free time inside four walls with their head buried in a screen right either scrolling
or on Netflix. And it's like, when did entertainment become the prime goal of leisure time?
Yeah? Absolutely, And it's a trend that we see not just across individual behaviors, but also in parenting practices and really across the board. It goes hand in hand with the shortening of our attention span, but in particular it's
emotional as well. And it's what I call the great mistake because if we focus on short term emotions, what makes me feel happy, what makes me feel calm, what makes me feel comfortable, over what's good for our long term development, our long term wellbeing, or what fits with our values, this is a mistake. So focusing on short term emotions rather than long term development is a mistake. It's a mistake in our lives because it stops us from doing what's meaningful or important in the long term.
And it's a mistake from a parenting point of view because it causes parents to intervene unnecessarily in a way that ultimately confers risk upon the child for other problems. So, you know, we see this in anxiety all the time. And I know we started with phones and now in anxiety, but we see this in anxiety because it's really normal to sometimes feel anxious. So if you do something that is new, different, challenging, or has a great deal of
responsibility attached to it. How often do you feel perfectly calm?
Not very often, unless you're a not kiss.
Exactly only in that case would right, So it's normal by definition when you face a challenge, it's normal to feel uncomfortable. But we've somehow pathologized normal nervousness, normal discomfort. You know, we could say colloquially, I feel anxious, Okay, fine, but that doesn't mean you've got an anxiety disorder. That doesn't mean anything's wrong. And so by pathologizing it, by reducing our we've lowered our expectations for what we can
and should tolerate. And this has vast repercussions. It's like we've lowered the bar across the board for what we should be able to handle. So that has implications for individuals, but on a population level, and we're seeing this play out in real time right now, Paul, is on a population level, it increases vulnerability to anxiety disorders. Yeah, so if i'm IF, I'm if as a young person, I'm implicitly or explicitly given the message that I shouldn't have
to tolerate the discomfort of a high pressure exam. For example, or I shouldn't have to endure the difficulty of telling my teacher that I didn't do my homework. Then that then magnifies. There's a cumulative effect of this belief set and this lack of habituation. We habituate to things. When
we face them, we calm down and we adjust. So if we don't learn to habituate to everyday challenges, everyday difficulties, how in the hell are we going to expect a young person at twenty twenty five, in their first job doing a university degree, who faces the challenges that we
know are inevitable. How can we possibly expect them to cope with that difficulty and discomfort if they've never had to face that difficulty and discomfort with the little things, the age appropriate things, when they were younger.
Mayor you are singing my song and you're singing it beautifully. I have been increasingly concerned of what I've seen, both from seeing my kids and their friends and seeing messages from schools, but also then seeing the ridiculously increasing medication rates, especially amongst our young people, and the mental health issues. And I have long believed that a huge part of that, In fact, the vast majority of that is that we are coddling our kids, we are wrapping them up in
cotton wool. We're making the freaking exact same mistake that happened in the nineteen eighties that came out of America, where it was all about boosting people's self esteem because they saw that people who had hire self esteem created less are made, had committed less crime. So they then thought, oh, if we just boost people self esteem, there'll be better citizens. And it turned into a freaking mess. And I think
we're doing exactly the same thing. I mean, I'm a big fan of discomfort tolerance, right, and you sort of alluded to it, are like, we have to learn to tolerate discomfort, both physical and psychological, if we want to prepare ourselves for life. But as you say, we are pathologizing stuff like nervousness and discomfort. And then there's a friggin pill.
For it, which is a really slippery slope. It becomes a cycle, and it very easily becomes a dependence. So you can become dependent on avoidance, you can become dependent on a pill, you can become dependent on reassurance. These are all what psychologists would call safety behaviors. They make us feel safe, but they don't actually alter the level of risk or experiencing in the world.
And they make it worse though in the long run, don't they both. With all of these avoidance behaviors, it just gets worse and worse.
Yeah, because we miss the bus. Because we need developmental to face those challenges, learn to sit with it, tolerate the discomfort, and habituate. Have the experience of becoming more comfortable in those uncomfortable situations. This is critical. This is the principle that underpins exposure therapy. Yes, yes, right, So you don't take the person. And I've seen this. If you do it half right, you're not doing it right.
And I've seen this out of this conversation with a lot of educators in our healthy mind schools is they'll say, well, we want to get this kid to overcome their school refusal and their social anxiety. So I had this conversation with one school and they said, well, we get the kid to come, and the kid's very anxious, and we reward them when they arrive. We tell them they've done
a great job. We can tell they're really struggling with it, but we say, well, we just want you to get through the door, and we just want you to start there and then we let them go home. Don't you think we're doing a good job. And I said, look, your heart's clearly in the right place. But if I'm honest, no, you're not doing a good job because what you're doing is right at the peak of this young man's anxiety level, right when it's peaking, you're saying you can go home.
So it's conditioning an association of feeling very anxious arriving at school and being at school, and it's conditioning absolute relief as you're getting away from school. And that's the opposite of the learning that we want to occur. We want him to come to school and have the experience of calming down and feeling better at school. Now, it doesn't have to go to zero. We don't expect someone
to be perfectly relaxed. But if you can get that subjective distress down by half from an eight to a four, let's say that's a step forward, and then the next time you do it might be a seven to two three or something. And then eventually the thing that seemed overwhelming actually isn't overwhelming anymore.
Just on that school refusal. I mean I'm hearing from I've done some work with different schools and also listening to different people that there's been a huge rise in school refusal. I think I read an article. What do you think is driving it? Is the stuff? Is it the stuff that we just talked about before, that that sensitization because of the coddling of young kids.
Yes, it's this generational shift to over parenting and what I call the great mistake, the prioritizing short term emotions over long term development. And it was made much worse by the COVID pandemic because if you were a kid who has had a propensity to being socially anxious, a global pandemic is exactly what you wished for.
Yeah, you can tap out, you can tap out.
And so if you think about these these developmental tasks that young people have as they grow, it's almost like they opted out of three seasons of your football or whatever. They're not going to be in that condition and they're not going to be on the same trajectory art towards unless we do something to make sure we remediate that.
Unless we really do the work of exposure and habituation to overcome those challenges, because the thing is the same principle that a psychologist will use in therapy to overcome an anxiety disorder is precisely the same principle by which someone builds confidence. It is stepping into discomfort, being willing to feel uncomfortable and staying in that situation long enough that you start to habituate and you start to feel more comfortable, and then just doing that repeatedly. So it's
actually not a mystery. But this is not widely known and it's not widely applied by parents.
Yeah, and I think schools play a huge role in this as well, And I'm keen to explore what you guys do when you go in and run programs with schools, because I'm seeing schools with messaging that is just making this shit worse, right, where it's all of this it's okay not to be okay, and giving them easy op oubts and things like that and talking about it so bloody much right when you talk about things research and
not the show. And I'm sure you've seen it that when you are constantly talking to young kids about mental health issues, it starts to become suggestibility. Particularly they're much more suggestible than adults.
Right, yes, And this is a huge issue and some schools. I find schools generally trying to do the right thing, but are often not in a good position to be aware of or interpret scientific evidence to understand what that best practice is from a psychological point of view. And so yeah, we see it a whole range of levels of maturity and compas around this. So you know, when we go into a school and we deliver the Healthy Minds program, we don't really talk about psychological disorders at all.
We talk about skills. So we teach them skills. It's a toolkit for managing yourself, understanding where emotions come from while we have them, that emotions are perfectly functional, as a reason we have them, how we can manage them well, and what causes you to have a healthy mind. Now, this is in contrast. I was invited to visit a school once somewhere in Australia which I will not name, and they said, we'd love you to come and just give us have a bit of an overview of our
pastoral care approach. And they gave me a two of the school. It's a very very very nice school and they said, look, this is one of the things we're doing in year nine. We think it's a real hallmark of our well being approach is for the year nine, we're sitting them down and across a semester we are going through the DSM.
No.
At the time they were and it was we talked of this week it's psychosis, next week it's this and this. Yeah, yeah, And they said it was a bit of an awkward moment because I said, they were very proud of it. They said, what do you think And I said, I think this is a terrible idea. Yeah, so, oh my god, that.
Is I said, I wanted to talk about the DSM, right, and I wanted to get your of you as a clinical psych So I'm finishing off my PhD in psychology, but just looking at the d s M. So the d s M five, I think there's now one hundred and six and disorders, psychological disorders, not one of which
has a biological trace. Right, So you think about physical diseases, diabetes, blood, sugar blood, actually you can measure it right, cardiovascar'sase, cancer, all of them have distinct biological triuses and to my knowledge, not one single condition, our issue or whatever we want to call it in the DSM of the one hundred and six has got a clear consistent biological treas Is that an issue.
I'm not sure whether I say that as an issue or not. It's I guess it's a challenge in the sense of if you want to explain behavior or internal phenomena like thoughts and feelings through biology, then yes, it's a challenge. That however, for me, doesn't mean just because something can't be traced to a biological cause doesn't mean or signature.
Not necessarily cause, but signature. Right, so something measurable in the breed. I don't know some handways be and mad on it, but yeah, But.
I would also challenge the idea that measuring brain activity is always explanatory. So you can do an MRI and it doesn't necessarily tell us what's really going on. And people, if we want to get really deep here, people will say, well, surely we are here because of our brain, that brain causes consciousness. I would suggest there's evidence that the brain inhibits consciousness, and that's another rabbit hole that we can
go down perhaps another day. So we want to avoid we want to be scientific, but we want to avoid scientism because if we take a purely materialistic or purely biological view of the world, it's somewhat limiting. But I think I get where you're coming from. In terms of the DSM, we can create categories of phenomenon. We can say, well, this is what depression is. It's this checklist of diagnostic criteria. We can say this is what anxiety is, and we
can do that across the board. What this really represents is a rarefication error. We raify something when we treat it as if it is real and absolute and concrete in the world, when really it's just a way of thinking about something. So I'll give you an example. We have diagnostic criteria for anxiety, depression, and needing disorders, and we treat them as if they're separate. Evidence suggests they're
not really that separate. So as a clinician, absolutely, if someone came to me with anxiety, it would be weird if they had no symptoms of depression, Or if someone appeared with BLIMI and IVOSA and they had no symptoms of anxiety, that would be weird and unusual. And this comorbidity is normal, Okay. It suggests to us that there are shared underlying mechanisms and that rather than being discreet
separate entities, they overlap. And the big breakthrough here came out of Boston University with Professor David Barlow when he
said there's a thing called transdiagnostic theory. And this, to my great good fortune, I became aware of at the beginning of my PhD. And it was the thing that caused us to have a breakthrough in prevention where other prevention programs failed because trans diagnostic theory says, if you think of those terms transmitting across and between diagnoses, what are the things that operate across and between multiple diagnoses, because they're going to be the clue to broadly and
powerfully impacting mental health. You either look for trans diagnostic risk factors, So what are the risk factors that operate across anxiety, depression, and eating disorders? What are the trans diagnostic protective factors and we've found them, And what are the transdiagnostic skills? So what are the broad skills that help someone to have a healthy emotional life or in other words, how to have a healthy mind. And this this was the thinking that went into our Healthy Minds program.
In a multi site controlled trial where We proved that you can prevent the onset of symptoms of anxiety and depression, and you can do it without talking about psychological disorders. So the risk factor that we found was unhelpful perfectionism, right,
it operates across all of those pathologies. The protective factor, and I'm not suggesting there's only one of these, but the protective factor was self compassion interesting and this broad toolkit of how the understand and manage your emotions, and that was what gave us the breakthrough. So the DSM can say, well, this is what depression is, but it's just a way of thinking about depression. It's not actually depression in the real world. We've got to think about it much more broadly than that.
Is it to you? Just one more question on a DSM, and then I letic goal just because I've got a clinical psychologist in front of me. Do you think it's problematic that the question that they will use for a
diagnosis appear to me to be leading questions. You look at the questions around anxiety, around depression, K ten, whatever one you're using, they appear to me to be leading questions, and particularly when put to a teenager, there can be a large amount of suggestibility, and if a teenager is wanting extra time on an exam answering a few questions
in a certain way, we'll get that. And there's now a rash of you sure you're aware of it, parents actually pushing doctors to get a diagnosis so that there are teenagers get extra time. So I know there's a couple of questions and comments rolled into that, So ticket however you want, Well.
When parents want to get extra time, I'll give the kid an easy ride. They're making the great mistake. They're prioritizing short term emotions of a long term learning and development. Wouldn't it be better for a child's long term development for them to learn to handle high pressure situations and to have the experience of those high pressure situations in an age appropriate supported way, which is what school is. Right, it's highly scaffolded. We don't want to we don't want
to mitigate these challenges for our kids. And this has completely changed the way I view my own parenting, because yes, I have, just like any other parent, a natural empathy for my son. If he comes home from primary school and he's upset because something happened with a friend, I naturally feel empathy for that, and I want to support him, of course I do. But there's a part of me that says, I'm grateful that you had that experience because you got to live through a day of feeling lonely
or left out. You came home to a loving family and you're going to learn that you can get up tomorrow and get on with it. So my concern is that where parents just see distressing their child and they think, oh, that's bad, but I want.
To stop it.
Let's instead ask what did they learn? Yeah, so you know, this might of all the dads you could have in the world. My son perhaps drew the short straw because when he was in reception, and it was his reception class was doing a thing in front of the whole school. They do it once a year at their assembly. And he said to me it was bathtime, and he said to me a couple of days before, he said, Dad, I'm going to be crook on Friday. He didn't do
a very good job of masking his intent. Now Friday came around and this was the day of the assembly. I said, no, you won't mate, You'll be fine. I just I dropped it. But Friday, I was out of the house because I was off doing a speaking thing, and my wife rang me. It was about quarter to nine and she ranged me and she said, I haven't seen him like tantrum like this since he was a toddler. And he's refusing to get dressed. He's got every malady
under the sun. He's very distressed. He's crying, he's screaming, he's holding onto the door frames. And so I said to him, sorry, I'm not there to help you deal with this, and I was secretly thinking, I'm really glad I'm not there to have to do with it. I said to her, you know what you've got to do, don't you, And she said, I've got to get him to school, and so she handed him over to the reception teacher, tears streaming down his face. They're really difficult
moments for parents. I'm not trying to minimize this. But that afternoon been there, absolutely, We've all been there. And that afternoon I was out doing a workshop somewhere else and my phone buzzed and it was a text message with a video clip of him on the stage saying his lines in front of the microphone. And when I got home, that night he said, Dad, I did it, and he was beaming. Now, if we had gone for the short term emotions, said, well, we just got to
keep him calm. This is overwhelming, it's too much, it's too hard. We would have denied him that learning opportunity. And the next year when that came around, he was still nervous, but not so much. And the next year he almost enjoyed it. And it's the cumulative effect of these little folks in the road that make a very big difference. Yeah, so I don't know if that's answer to your question, Paul, but.
Yeah, no, no, look, look it certainly has the Actually, interestingly, my daughter was going through year twelve doing exams and one of her friends, you know, on the day of exam was like super nervous and said to Kia, are you not nervous? And Kira said, why would I be nervous? And nobody's trying to kick me in the head because she had competed in karate for years, right and done that.
And actually she actually said to us and to me and Carly, I'm glad that you guys pushed me in karate and made me do all of that uncomfortable stuff. Because I'm now seeing the benefits. Right, that's from an eighteen year old, which is pretty cool.
Brilliant that is that is really cool. And I lived at myself as a as a gojuru expose because yeah, yeah, and just you know, doing a university exam or anything that comes up, I think, well, I've stood in a ring with blood on my gee facing a six foot three opponent and had to keep going. That's obviously in a tournament that you know that it changes your frame for what you can handle. And we want our kids to build an expectation of themselves that they can handle these things when they come up.
And I think that's one of the major parenting tips, right, And it's not new this advice. Epictetus two thousand years ago said we must all undergo a hard winter training and not enter into lately that for which we have not prepared, and he was talking about life, right, And I think it's but I think there's a fundamental driver of this is that we seem to have an expectation today that life should be easy and that stress is
bad and that we shouldn't feel discomfort and stress. But I think if we flip it, and we are to just teach kids life is hard. You'd better be prepared. You need to train right, and you and that whole discomfort tolerance and that, and yes, it's got to be a principle from exercise training progressive overload, where you're just slightly extending that person, right, and if you go too far then you've got to bring it back and sit down and learn the lessons and stuff like that. Right.
I remember just on this another story when I was doing helicopter training, and we do progressive overload in the helicopter training, right, you do a simulator and you know, the the instructor, we're throwing a few curlyes and then you go and you do the thing in the aarth progressive overload. But when we were going through there was shitty weather and we lost a lot of training and we ended up having to one night. They said, look,
we're just going to have to go out here. And it was a it's called the Thirsty War used to be every Thursday off Plymouth, NATO would run war games, and that was supposed to be our final flight, but we were only on flight two, and because we lost someone's time, they said, look, guys, you're going to have to go out here and do this. I remember we took off me and this other guy, Simon, in different helicopters, and I went up and then you come down and
it's pitch black. You got to turn your radar on and you've got two radios running, and it was insane, and the pilots didn't I had contacts all over my radar, hadn't a clue what was what got This is the first time I had a complete mental overload and a massive brillan freeze and the instructor had to get me out of the seat and I'm sitting there. He took over, and I'm just sitting there, going, oh, I've so fucked
that up. And then came back and the other guy, Simon, came in and he was shell shocked as well, and the instructor satistyan and went, guys, that his mistake. We shouldn't have taken you out there because it was particularly busy, but it just showed you that massive overload for us. And then four weeks later and we ended up in a thirsty war scenario and we were fine because we then had the proper progressive overload, so I think, but that's the critical thing, isn't it. The steps have to
be progressive. We've got to be just outside of our comfort zone. Yes, we've got to recalibrate, take it all on board, and then go again. Right.
Yeah, and this, So the psychological equivalent of progressive overload is graded exposure. Yeah and so yeah, and so it's precisely the same thing. You have a hierarchy or a set of steps on a ladder. The goal behavior at the top is too hard right now, But what are the successive steps that approximate that goal behavior that I need to get to? And you start with the one that's just out of your comfort zone. But you don't
just do it once. You do it repeatedly, and when that becomes easy, then you go to the next step. And so with parents, I say, well, clinically we'd say graded exposure. It's part of therapy. But in parenting, if you want to build confidence in your child, you do preemptive exposure. So what is the appropriate level of challenge that my child needs in order to build or consolidate this capability? And we can engineer challenges for our kids. My son wants something from a shop us. This is funny.
Last year, were we went into State just for a weekend and my son he wanted to order something from the room service in the hotel and I said, sure you can, but just you give them a ring. He was seven, and I said, he said, what do you want me to pick up the phone and ring? I said, yeah, I want you to ring them. You want your check and nuthers, Just ring them, say your name, say the room and you'd like it. And he said, Dad, I feel really nervous. My heart's I said, that's okay, there's
no problem. Just give it a go. And he rang and he ordered his chicken nuggets and he got them. And so you know, it's just about finding these little opportunities to build that capability. And they don't seem like much in the moment, but the cumulative effects is what really builds our capability.
Yeah, and that reminds me of the whole challenge versus threat response. And you know, let we take a situation, doesn't matter what the situation, which could even have been that one. When people have a threat response and they're thinking about, oh, this is bad, bad, bad, bad bad, you know I can't do this. It activelyates cortisol, and cortisol has a half life of more than an r. So when our leader, you're still having stress hormones run
through the body. Whereas a challenge response active it's a fighter flight mechanisms. It's adrenaline nor adrenalin, and they have a half life of a minute or less. But the key thing in challenge versus threat is people need to feel that they have the resources to be able to
achieve it, right. So it brings us back to it's got to be a step that they feel that they can just make and then to your point, doing it again and again and again gives you the confidence that I can I do it and maybe now I can take the next step. Right. But that's pretty key, isn't it. So we can't just throw them into the deep end and let them sink or swim. It's got to be created, right.
And that's where for every parent and for every coach, for every teacher, it's the knowledge of the young child in your care, that young person. You have a sense of, Okay, where are they at on the ladder? Where is that boundary for them? And we want to yeah, just tailor it for each individual. And of course, child developments not linear,
you know, sometimes we have great stride. Sometimes it feels like at plateaus, we've got to be aware of that, and if it is too much, we just go a little bit down the ladder and do that repeatedly and build that and then step up. So but it's I think the principle is this is a systematic way with which we can inoculate kids against anxiety. We can we can build their confidence and capability, and we greatly reduce their susceptibility to anxiety. And the sporting field does that.
Sport's great. You got to, you got to pass. Your heart's racing. You're sweating, you've got to. You're losing, but you've got to keep trying. It's a microcosm of life. And so getting kids into school sport is great too.
I think I think it's absolutely critical. In fact that my list is probably hope. He said this before, But when our kids were young, we sat them down and said, you need to do a team sport and a martial art and we will help you and find the ones that you like. But that's the house rules, and you can stop when you want, but you need to find somewhere else to live. But it's been so good for
both of our kids. Both of them independently, the martial arts for all of that discipline and particularly competing and you know what it's like, you know, the managing fear, managing anxiety, but the team sport in terms of interacting with other people and and being part of a team and getting on with people that you don't particularly like.
I think they're really critical. But I wanted to come back to what you said about those manageable steps and just for the parents who are out there are and then closing the loop and and a debrief and like should they parent be when they've done it gone, hey, I'm really proud of you you achieve that, and and bah and give them that positive reinforcement or what schewed? Is there a a an optimal and bit of feedback that we should give them when they both succeed and when they feel so.
I've got a few things to say on that. One is, I think reinforcement is fine and good, but you're reinforcing.
The effort, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes yes.
The second thing is sometimes there's a lot of value in just treating things as business as usual because kids, I've become aware that as parents today we make so many evaluative statements about our kids. You did great, you did a good job here. You know, there's so much valuation. I remember in my youth. I don't recall always being told you did a great job, no matter what you did, or there's just there seems to be much more evaluation these days. And I don't think that's healthy that we're
constantly getting this sense of what did I do? Good or bad? Because ultimately what really comes from it is what did you learn? That's really the benefit.
And does that evaluation, suchuration create an expectation that they're going to be praised.
Yes, praised and evaluated, and neither of those things is really that healthy. I don't think we need that expectation. The other thing is sometimes people assume that after they go through some sort of exposure, so they did the talk at assembly, or they face their fear, they often assume that they're going to feel really good. But that's not always the case. Sometimes people feel strung out, they feel exhausted. So it's not about how do you feel, it's about did you do it? Yah?
Nice? I like it? I like it a lot. Yeah, that's that's no talk about. So we've talked a lot about kids here, let's talk about the corporate space and what have you noticed in the corporate well being landscape since we spoke? Is there are similar things going on in the corporate world as there are in schools in terms of that sensitization to mental health stuff or what else a you're noticing.
Possibly there is a little I'm noticing that in the corporate space, there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of challenges around getting people together, particularly when you're talking about training and things like that, just just time and overall it's really a fight for people's attention at the end of the day. That we're seeing that across
the board for sure. So the rise of digital tech knowlogy and how you use digital technology in a corporate well being space is one of the key issues of the day, I reckon.
So what have you So let's talk about digital stuff. So we are living in this increasingly digitized world which has lots and lots and lots of problems, but there's also some potential solutions. So how does well being fit? I know you're making some strides in this place, so we what's your opinion on how well being fits into the digitized world. You know, in terms of what are the negatives and what are the opportunities.
The negatives are doing it poorly because you know, there seems to be this assumption out there that if you just take something, digitize it, add points, badges and a leaderboard, that you're going to solve all your problems. And that's not true. So we've been through through this learning ourselves. So quite a long while ago, we would develop we would deliver our workshop, which we know people on average love. It's called Seven Secrets to a Healthy Mind. And people
tend to love this workshop. They get a lot out of it. But we wanted to move the needle behaviorally, so we devised this thirty day well being Challenged where we would just give people one thing to do each day after the workshop. Now, people loved the idea, but we noticed over after about a couple of weeks, engagement just went over a cliff. It just plants.
I to see the thing with my app right, lots of enthusiasm has start.
And then room, it just drops off.
Right.
Yeah, And so we really my business partner Nicolie and I, we we spent a lot of time thinking about this and talking about it. We thought there's got to be a magic formula. We've got to find a way to really engage people properly and move the needle. And you know, I've spent ten years formally studying psychology, many more years practicing it, and I thought I understood bits and pieces
of human motivation pretty well. But I did eventually come across what I think is a bit of a magic formula, and it was a more concise conceptualization of human motivation than anything mainstream psychology taught me. And it's something called the Octlysis framework. Was otalisis so its eight core motivational drives, and it was developed by this gamer, a Taiwanese American called Ukai Chow. I had the pleasure of learning a bit from Yukaichow a few years ago before we developed
our mind Fire app. And he was a gamer, and he spent a couple of years, as the story goes, playing this game and putting all his time and energy into this game. And one day he stopped and he had this epiphany. He thought, oh shit, I've got nothing in the real world to show for all of this effort. I've just expended over two years playing this game. And he thought, if only I had applied that level of engagement and energy into my study, or my career or
some other in my life. And so it was just like this lightning bolt, and he committed himself then and there to analyzing the mechanics of game experiences to apply them in non game settings.
Nice because the gearmers have got it kneeled right in terms of engagement and all their strategies they use, they've just got it kneeled they do.
And so when he came up with and he's widely recognized as the world's leading gamification expert, and he's a proponent of what he calls human focused design. And this is a really profound thing because he says most experiences are function focused and you see this in the digital world. Does your app do x y z?
Right?
And this is how most tech people think as well. But he says, you don't want to think about that. Don't think about does it do x y z? Think about why would someone do xyz? And how do they feel as they're doing it. This is what human focused design is and it revolutionizes the way you start to see digital experiences. We've all had the experience of doing something and just frustrates the hell out of you because
it's not easy to use. And Uki Chow would say, well, people don't want to use smart products, they want to feel smart when they're using products, and this is the essence of it. So we used the Octallysis design process to build our new corporate well being app, mind Fire, And I'll give you a really quick overview of the eight core drives if.
You like Paul, Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
So epic meaning and calling, feeling like you're doing something that's above and beyond yourself. So one of the things mind Fire does is it raises money to help cure childhood cancer. Nice, that's a motivator.
Right, yeah, yeah, something bigger than Yeah, I get it. Absolutely.
Development and accomplishment. Feeling like you're progressing. So anytime you see a progress bar as you're feeling out a form, that's core drive two. You feel like you're progressing and accomplishing. Empowerment of creativity and feedback that's the third core drive. So if you ever have to strategize or answer a question or use your own choices, that's core drive three. So we have quiz questions in our app. That's activating it.
Ownership and possession so this drive to collect and accumulate and organize. So yeah, so if you did get points or your team's doing well, it's not just about this feeling of progression, it's also yours. It becomes an ownership thing, social influence and relatedness core drive five. Now this is huge. So what we built into mind Fire is not just that it gives you well being missions. It's not just that as you do your missions you raise money for
childhood cancer research. It's that you have to work together with your team of between five night of your colleagues in order to unlock the next day's mission, and you're depending on each other. I call this benevolent conformity pressure. Yes,
it's a healthy peer pressure. So you can see if I'm halfway through the day, I can see on the app that Paul hasn't opened his mind Fire mission for today, and I can send you a nudge saying Paul, don't forget yea and we want to One person on any given day is the torchholder, and if they don't complete their mission that day, it breaks the streak which fuels the donations to childhood cans.
Now I spent like the old streaks thing with Snapchat, right.
Yeah, exactly exactly. So the fact that it's so visible and we're depending on each other and you can see what your teammates and colleagues are doing. And to prove that you've completed your task for the day, you have to upload what we call a testimony, So it's either a short selfie video responding to a prompt or a short written answer and it comes up in a feed. So you're learning about each other. You're learning about their responses to a psychological concept, or their values, or what
they did for exercise that day. Core Drive six is scarcity in impatience, So it's this wanting to get something we can't have or we can't see, or like a countdown timer so you've got to get something done by set time. So it's a black hat motivation. It feels uncomfortable. Unpredictability and curiosity. You don't know until you get up in the morning and you click the mission slide. You don't know what your task is going to be for that day.
And that is really interesting, that unpredictability.
And we know that.
Small rewards that are not expected release more dopamine than big rewards that are expected. Right, it's that prediction error in the Brian Yeah.
So it's the easter egg phenomenon. I've just found something right, Yes, And so if you randomly wake up and you've been given a power up something that you can use to strategize within the mind Fired teams experience, that's an example of that unpredictable easter egg phenomenon. And the eighth one is lost in avoidance. We have a drive to avoid what's undesirable. So if you lose the streak, you have to take a dollar out of your donation's chest to
buy a key to unlock the next day's mission. So we want to avoid it's that fear of loss, right, So you know, this was a great experience. We used Octalysis, we worked we actually worked with the Octalysis group a bit to help refine in the design and all the technical aspects of mind Fire. But we're in the final phases of testing right now, ironing out the bugs. It's been four and a half years of development and we're very close to unleashing it on the world.
That's very cool, very cool. Well, when you've unleased it and certainly let us know and we can push it out to all the listeners because there's there's plenty of corporates and that are right. So what's tell me this the last question.
What's the big thing that you're concerned about today from a psychological perspective, and what are you excited about?
My big concern is that we have this good knowledge about how to reverse the stats around mental ill health. We now have evidence for preventing the onset of anxiety and depression. It's just not out there enough. And we've lobbied the government at the highest levels. We've you know, I just feel like it's a drop in the ocean compared to what we need to be doing to really turn the tide. But the good news is we have
the knowledge to do it. What excites me is all of the unanswered questions that are out there that we have the potential to figure out and improve our human experience. I'm just about to publish a study into the treatment of grief and we've This is a whole probably a whole other conversation, but I always felt helpless as a
therapist when I encounter grieving people. I don't anymore. We've now come across a therapy thatatic dramatically reduces sadness in a very short period of time, and it's just, I think, a breakthrough and this is my side project that excites me very much that I'm working on around my healthy minds and mind firework.
That's very cool, Tom, Thank you for your time. I loved the conversation. Very organic, meandering, but very very useful. I think for anybody out there who has a brillan and especially I think for parents who are struggling with bringing up their kids in and to be mentally healthy
in today's very very challenging world. I mean, it's easier in a lot of ways, but it's a shit a little more difficult in a lot of ways because there's a whole heap of challenges that we never had to deal with the kids, most of them in the palm of the bloody heart right.
Absolutely. Now, it's been fabulous to catch up with the Poe. I'm glad to see you looking fit and well, and thanks for having me again.
Yeah, absolute pleasure. We'll have you on again at some stage. Thanks Tom, Bye for now.