I get a team. It's Harps and Tiff and the good doc who will intro in a moment. Tiffany and Cook over there at typ Central just killing it. She's training for a mystery, something that will all be revealed eventually, but she's training like a mofo at the moment. We don't want to say too much, but how is the training going. I'm loving at Harps. I'm do you know how funny it is to work with you for this long? And still we're a bit starstruck that I got to train with Craig Anthony Halfer this week.
Craig style.
Well, I definitely don't be starstruck because I'm just an old dickhead that you tell.
You what the Harp's novelty never wears off. It never wears off. You'd think it might.
Well, I think I've trained you twice in your life, and I trained you on the So TIFF's doing a thing. We can't say what it is at the moment. Well we can, but I told her I don't want it to and I will be revealed why. But I'm overseeing her training at the moment, and it's fair to say that it's not easy and it's fair to say that you literally sent me in I suggests they saying I fucking hate you, which was quite hurtful I feel, especially
seeing as I'm doing it for nothing. I'm an only child, but insecure a couple of pats on the back wouldn't go Australia.
I wasn't even playing that app Eitherhaps they were true emotions.
Anyway, keep training. Professor Mark Cohen, Doctor Mark Cohen, Mark Cohen, welcome to you, just bloody Marko.
Welcome to the show, sir, great, thanks to really happy to be here.
What do you think about the relationship between Tiff and I do there's a bit of passive aggressive stuff going on. She kind of it seems like your old buddies.
Yeah, but then that that trainer sort of coach and an athlete relationship is gotten strained.
Yeah, well we it's being a You probably don't know this, but my arguably the first trainer in Australia. So I
started training people. I was one of the first anyway personal trainers, and then I set up Australia's first PT center and so I spent decades literally training people, working with teams and athletes, so that coaching people vibe and energy I step into very easily, and it doesn't you know, there are some people who go really well with it, but then there are other people who really need a little bit of molly coddling, which is not really my style,
so it doesn't always work well. There's different approaches in molly colleen or slapping around or all that. Anyway, enough about my bullshit, give us the you know what, your buio was so long, you've done so much stuff. Rather than me read the two hour kind of thing I have in front of me, would you be so gracious as to tell my audience as long or as briefly as you want mark who you are and what you do. Sure, I'll try and keep it brief.
So so, I'm just a human being trying to work out how to have a fun, happy life. And I've thirty eight years at university studying wellness to try and find out how I can have a fun, unhappy life. So I did Western medicine, I did Chinese medicine, I did psychology, I did electrical computer systems engineering. I spent half of my medical career. I've had a thirty year
integrative medicine career. So I was head of the Integrative Medicine Association and very involved in natural medicine, but it has been half that time as a professor at r MIT,
where I created wellness as a discipline. I had a whole bunch of PhD students who have studied things like or you know Lauren Burns who e lead athlete, you know, E lead athlete performance, but also you know saunas and ice bathing and health retreats and organic food and yoga and meditation and massage, basically all the fun stuff that's really fun for me. But it's got no money behind it, no research but no research funds, and no dig pharmaceutical
industry behind it. But it was fantastic for me to learn about for myself. You know, herbal medicine. I've written big textbooks on herbal medicine that every natural path have studied out of the last twenty years. First textbook on the SPA industry. I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up, but that I quit my job as a pro a full time tenured professor
end of twenty eighteen. And after you finish unit, you take a gap year, so I took a gap year twenty nineteen and covered the world and ran some retreats. I'm very involved with I love bathing in hot water, so I'm very involved with the spa industry and the hot spring industry. I'm part owner of a hot spring in New Zealand and now I've just been made medical director of the Peninsula Hot Spring Group, which is a big hot spring here in Victoria. But they've got five
hot springs now. We're opening up one in Cannamuller out back Queensland. We've got one in metng we Go, one in New Zealand. We're opening one in Phillip Island. So I work a lot with the wellness industry. I publish a heap of research, more than a hundred research papers and textbooks, and lately I've been writing a lot of poetry, condensing a whole lot of medical wisdom into very condensed poems.
I've written a co children's books which aren't really for children, but they're amazingly illustrated books, but they're very deep consciousness raising messages. So I have fun by creating connection. I mean say they say the currency of wellness is connection. Yeah, I love connecting with people, making ancient wisdom or advance signs sort of understandable to the mainstream. And I'm a sort of an entrepreneur lately, so I'm an accidental entrepreneur really.
In the Lockdow first Lockdown, I created a kombucha company that makes probiotics infused with herbs based on all my herbal knowledge. I have a water filtered company that makes the whole house filters that have clean water because there wasn't any filters I could recommend to patients. I still do a very little bit of medical practice, like half the day a week online avocate medical cannabis. But I'm still trying to work out what I'm what I'm going to do when I grow up.
I don't know how. I don't know how you could possibly squeeze all that in. But what a bloody interesting life. So when I think about what lies it the intersection of philosophy and psychology and science and spirituality and wellness, it's you. You're in the middle of all of that.
Like what I love is being on the edge of disciplines but then combining them. So I credit wellness as an academic discipline, but wellness is not just health science. It's business practices, it's sustainability, it's design, and I really love learning at the and bringing disciplines together. So in integrated medicine, I've always loved bringing natural, complementary traditional medicine with conventional medicine, or science and spirituality, or the academic
world and the entrepreneurial commercial world. So yeah, I like to be at the interface. I mean, there's a permaculture principle that says the interesting things happen on the edge, and if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
So I like living on the edge. So the guy who kind of lived in academia but not really, well, you're in it, but you're out of it, and you kept pushing the boundaries and stepping into other places and state other areas and expanding and intersecting with other people doing other things. Was that embraced by your fellow academics or was it frowned upon once you started to open all of these doors that weren't particularly scientific.
Well, I actually had a pretty good reception, but like I always say, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. So there's a group of doctors who came like about ten fifteen years older than I am. Really fought the medical system that got deregistered. You know, they're always rubbish and doing natural people like Ian gaul Or and Ian Bright Hope and Sally and.
Whereas I was still on their shoulder.
And because I had a medical degree and a PhD and I always talked about research and evidence space, I was actually quite accepted. So I think I was the guy on the TV to talk about defending natural medicines when there was a natural medicine, or they'd roll me out at a cardiology conference or a rheumatology conference to tea to speak to specialists about natural medicine because I
didn't want a natural talking to medical specialists. But that have me as a doctor with science and research behind me. So I've actually had a pretty good run. But having said that, I started out I was a Monish university. Well that's where I did my medical degree. But then I spent ten years creating a center for Complementary Medicine, and I wasn't the university wanted it is because I
wanted to create it. A created electives that the students loved and brought money, and then I had honored students, so I sort of created that off my own bat, but I was able to do it whereas other doctor. I mean I was the first person to teach acupuncture to medical students in Australia, not because the university wanted it, because I thought it was a fun thing to do
that It was so I got to do that. And then at r MIT I got this great position to be attended Professor of Complementary Medicine, and I wanted to create wellness as an academic discipline. It's not because the university wanted it. I just wanted to have wellness as a discipline. It was a really good sort of field for me to playing. I've got to interact with all these different professionals and perma culture and yoga and positive psychology and bring all that into a you know, a
postgraduate forum. So yeah, I was allowed to do it. It wasn't really because the university wanted it. I did it off my own bat and it was a.
Lot of fun to do.
But I've had a really good run because I think I have had a really firm foot in the evidence based conventional medical world, as I'm really firm foot in the you know, the spirituality, natural medicine side, and I didn't really well, I represented both very well. Both both sides were happy with you know, you know, I bought value to both sides.
So like a lot of people in their career are driven by ticking boxes or you know, status or making lot to do, nothing wrong with any of those things. But but what drives you because it seems like a myriad of things, Well, I mean curiosity, fun. Well how do I focus on fun?
How can I have the best, most fulfilling, rewarding life and one of the most fun things to do. So that's really been my driving goal since I started into medicine. And I mean, I think I do have this sort of inferiority complex because I mean, who needs two PhDs and a medical degree and an honors degree and all these? You know, So I was clicking degrees and credibility because I'm probably very insecure. But really I went into medicine originally ninety eighty two because I wanted to have fun.
And I think in medicine would teach me about the body and life and death and everything in between, will teach me how I can have the most fun fulfilling life. Not because I wanted to help sick people. So you know, fun has been really the focus. And you know, when I pick my students, I pick students who are got something I'm going to learn from and it's something I'm
very interested in. So I've had a really diverse research career and a really diverse student population who are you know, PhD students and things, because because I'd follow the fun and funny is always happening at the edge as well. I mean, fun happens at the edge of your capacity. Yeah, if you know what's do and everything, it's just become boring and we can make money that way, but money has never been my dry. Having fun has So that's fir, that's my focus.
Do you think that a lot of people when it comes to career settle and you know, we find sounds a bit judge. I don't mean it too, but you know, we do a thing and we wake up five years later, we're still doing the thing that doesn't really blow our socks off or fulfill us. But we're in a kind of a groundhog dayus of operating system. And you know, it ticks a box and it meets the needs. There's not a lot of joy, there's not a lot of learning.
There's not a lot of fun, but we've got to have a job, and so this is the job, and then after we've done the job, then we'll try and have some fun.
Then.
I think that's typical.
I think most people are like that because you know, you need security, you need to be able to pay your bills and feed your family and do those things, and you know, you fall into a position that provides that security, and then it becomes really scary to move outside that. And I've had some really edgy times in my career where I was going into the unknown and you know, I didn't have security. I didn't know if it was going to work out, and that was pretty edgy.
And I was fortunate that I was in you know, I was able to deal with that in security, but also I felt I had a good backup with my family and my degree. It's going to good aways go back into medicine. But I think that's quite typical. And then people have this that's where you have the work life, divide the work for money and security, and then you have your life where you have your fun. Whereas I've never really done that, and right now it's like I don't I mean, I'm sitting at home in my kitchen
table right now. I don't know if I'm working. This is you know, this is not.
What I do.
I'm just living my life and things happen. But I think most people do have that compromise, and I think.
That society is built that way. That you have a job and.
That's where you get paid for and then you have recreations and holidays and after time, and that's when you get your enjoyment. And if they talk about work life balance, but it's really difficult. If you're really dividing, if you don't like what you do, then then slowly it's killing you.
I talk about a thing doc called work impact, so not work life balance, but whatever you do, whether it's twenty hours a week or sixty hours a week, what impact physically, mentally, emotionally that thing has on you. Because I'm a bit like you. I haven't had a job in inverted commas since I was twenty six, which was
thirty three years ago. So I've worked for myself forever, and I don't really have a sense of well, I have no sense of a job, and even when I work, I don't really have I don't know what the experience of work is for others, but for me, like right now, you know, this is part of my job in inverted commas, talking to you, interviewing you. We're on a podcast, we have sponsors where associated with Nova, we're on their platform.
This is you know. But you and I could be at the cafe talking and it would be the same sense for me, the same experience, right, I think you know it's regard though. I think we're both.
I'm born in sixty four, so it sounds like we're about the same.
Time September sixty three. Yeah. Yeah, But and I think some like you might do eighty hours a week of something, and people go eighty hours is too much. Don't do eighty that's ridiculous, Like what if you love it. I do eighty hours every week because I'm studying full time and working full time. But it doesn't But when I'm working, like for me that the over arching experience is something between curiosity and joy and fun. There's very little that I do where I go. I fucking hate this. I
am not like that. Nothing feels like labor to me. The only thing that I don't love to do, which I do, which you would understand more than any of us, is you know, reading journal articles and you know for all my research and stuff, which doesn't light my fire, but it's part of the process, you know. I actually like reading journal articles, which stuff I can. I send you a few and you just give me the fucking Reader's digest version.
Send it there software that AI softly that will do that for you much. Now, which is did you rearkable when you.
When you were studying medicine at Monash, which is where I'm studying. So you're in this it's very kind of structured kind of medical model, and you're learning Western medicine. Of course, in the middle of that. Were you curious about we completely invested in that and when this is me for the next thirty years. Or were you simultaneously thinking about Eastern medicine and Eastern philosophies and all the other kind of things that.
Intersect well, I absolutely was, so I did. I started off in Moe Nash Western medicine and I did three years of that and thought, hey, I haven't learned how to have fun at all. They've taught me a lot about disease and illness, but not about wellness. I actually took a year off and did an honors degree in psychology and physiology. And at the time I wanted to study pleasure, but that this is like fifteen twenty years before positive psychology was a thing. So I actually they
said you can study pain, so I didn't honor. I think a pleasure in pain. You know, it's a fine line, you know. If I learned about one, I learned about the other side. She did an honors degree in psychology and physiology, so covering mind and body. And in that year I came across you know, Chinese medicine and acupuncture and reading about these Chinese martial artists and meditators who improve with age.
I thought, I want some.
Of that, you know, I want to improve with age. We're in the Western medicine. You know, you deteriorate with age, and you know it's all about how you manage that age deterioration process. So I got really intrigued by Eastern medicine. So I went back and did my fourth year of my medical degree to get some clinical experience, and then I took three years off my medical degree to do
a PhD in Chinese medicine. So I was right in the middle of my and that was a big That was one of those moments where I pulled the security out from under it. Me. I'd studied four years of medicine, did an honors degree, and suddenly I'm off traveling to Asia to study acupuncture and may never come back. But I was sort of driven to do that because it was my curiosity and I thought that would be much more fun. And I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't followed my own no path.
So you did three years of medicine, then you did honors, then did fourth year of medicine, then you went. I love how you say you had a year off, and in the year off you did honors in physiology, and so it's not really a year off, bro, but anyway, and then you took another three years off in inverted commas and did a PhD, which, by the way, is pretty quick to do a PhD. Did you then come back and do your fifth year or I.
Came back then and finished my medical degree and started working as a doctor and the intern and did that, And then I did a second PhD in electrical computer systems engineering, just because I wanted to understand how technology could assess the body and how the body works from a communication perspective, and we study communication networks for electrical computer systems.
Engineers, not no doctors. Wow, and so do you what do you? I mean, I'm sure you think a million things. So this is a dumb question, but I'll open the door about the you know, the convergence of biology and technology now where like it's it's becoming intertwined. It's mind blowing.
I've I've just written an article on biohacking for the Global Wellness Institute. I've been part of the Global Wellness Institute for the last seventeen years. You had to do a bit of research on this because I've always been on the front of that technology biology interface. So you know, like looking at devices that you know, buio feedback and consciousness tech, you know, binoral beats and that sort of stuff, which I'm studying in the nineteen eighties. And if you
look what's happening now, it's mind blowing. In you know, you've heard about Zeno bots, the living robots that are they alive? Are they know their machines, but they're living and they can reproduce and they can know they can die, but then they can spoil others. And so we're getting to this borderline of what is alive and what is what is living?
And then you've got all the AI, which is is that sentient? How do you know when it's sentient?
And then you've got and this is what I was really interested when I was when I was making the decision to study medicine nineteen eighty one, I figured, one day, we're going to be able to control all the sensory inputs into the body, no site, sound, tage, taste, smell, temperature, everything, and you're going to be able to program those inputs to make the best healing experience for you, personalized based on all the information I get from your body and
in real time. And it's you know, we're still not there yet, but we're probably two to five years away from that where you get real time biofeedback that can then either put pressure, you know, like massage chairs that can massage your body, or electromagnetic fields, or sight and sound and color or video that is tuned just to you.
And we're also getting to the point where technology is getting to master practitioner level, so you know, you go to a master massage therapist for example, they'll put they'll suss out your body, they'll work out where the source spots are, and they'll put just enough pressure and that gets you to the point of focusing your attention on
that point. But just before you WinCE and you know contract, they'll relax because they're studying your faith, they're studying your breathing, they're studying their own they've got their own intuition of what works, and that's that master practitioner level. Well, we're getting to the point where AI can do that. I mean, we've already see to the point with you know, AI can beat us in chairs and AlphaGo and poker and
Rubik's Cube and all these things. But we're getting to the level where AI can actually interact with our body as good or not, if not better than a master practitioner can, and actually interact with us in real time for you know, healing us, for creating excitement, for creating fun, for taking us on journeys and narrative explorations, that you can pread a whole world that is designed just for you.
I think that're heading towards that. That's not far away. Amazing. We had a guy and called Andrew Hessel, who's a microbiologist and a geneticist. He was on the other day and we're talking about synthetic biology, and we're talking about genetic engineering and programming cells and like totally personalized drugs built for your DNA, and it's it's it's bloody overwhelming, it's overwheling.
So the stuff I've been reading, I mean they can already, they can they can three D print an ear or a bladder and body parts, so they take stem cells and they can take a skin, you know, skin scaffold. So you're talking about body modification. So just for fashion, if you want you have wings in the future, they'll be you'll be able to order which we want, and they'll be part of your body. You know, if you want to have an extra ear or pixi ears or whatever shape you want.
This is all coming.
The synthetic biology and that in it's not even just synthetic, it's it's you can actually transform real biology. And we're doing that already with you know, Crisper, and there's these biohackers and inject themselves with gene editing technology to grow their muscles or you know that you can buy gene editing stuff online to make glow in.
The dark beer.
So you yeah, it's I mean it's really crazy the technology that we're coming up, and it is this merging of the inanimate world with the animate world, you know, And if you go back to the the ancient ancient wisdom, I really like combining advance signs with ancient wisdom. I mean, everything was alive. There was no distinction betweenimate and animates. And I think we're coming back to that, you know, as a big sort of spiraling back, but with using modern technology for that realization.
I feel like a long long time ago, as a species and as individuals within that species, because of the environment that we lived in and what we did and what we didn't have, I feel like we were much more connected with our body and our physiology and biology,
and that we were much more intuitive and instinctive. And in two tenty and twenty three, where you've got access to everything, you know, in terms of food and booze and drugs and everything, to change your state is just you know, three feet away, we've kind of become disconnected from that biofeedback, that's right.
I think we have lost our own intuitive sense of who we are. And I think that you can reclaim that, and a lot of the things I talk about are trying to reconnect people to that sense of their own biology, of their own physiology. And I think there is a danger, you know, with all these biometric devices now you know, the fitbits and the aura rings and stuff, where you know, it's nice about how well you sleep and how many steps you've done, but you sort of it detaches you
from your own intuition. You lose faith in your own intuitive sense of your body, and you're trusting output from some device. I think there'll be a circling back, so we're actually not going to need this technology at all, but we're not there yet.
They're still to go. That's such a good point, Like when we would look at a number that's on our watch and would feel good or bad based on that number. Yeah, not how well you sleep.
Oh look, you know, my watcher tells me how well I sleep, rather than knowing when I wake up in the morning.
Oh that was a good night's sleep. So over the years, dock one of the things that I did thousands of times, which I wouldn't do anymore. But back then we didn't know any better. But in the old days, in the eighties and nineties, we would weigh members or weigh clients every whatever, once a week or something. People would want
to be weighed. And somebody could be having a great day, they're happy, everything's good, and they stand on the scales and they look at a number that appears between their toes and then all of a sudden, life shit, They're having a bad day. They're depressed, they're you know, because some number appears between their toes that isn't the number that they want. But thirty seconds ago, they felt really good physically, mentally, emotionally, felt really good. And then now
they've got a new bit of information. Now they feel terrible despite all the physiological kind of stuff that was, you know, a minute ago, they were good.
And I think, I mean, I see that a lot in medicine. So for example, there's this been trend in medicine, especially natural medicine, where they'll do still a whole lot of testing, yeah, your blood, you know, serum, rhubarb and minerals and whatever, rather than actually find out what's what
symptoms you have and treating the patient. Yes, and I think you know, when you when you're actually really and it does take a lot of skill to take a good history and you know, inquire into a patient how they're feeling, and you know when do that starts and really investigating what's happened. So it's very easy just to order a pathology test and seeing your minerals, your blood levels or whatever, and then treating the numbers on the pathology test rather than actually treating the patient.
And I think there is a place for both.
I mean, it's really good to have information, and the more information you've got you can make better decisions. But to rely just on that information for your decision making and not rely on the intuitive side and the experiential side of what's actually happening, I think the danger there will be we're sort of the technology becomes between us and our intuition.
I know you don't see patients too often these days, but when you do, when somebody comes to you as a medical doctor, do you ever put on another hat and go? I actually think you should go and work in the garden, or go for a jog, or it's an acupuncture or you know, play with your puppy seven times a day. Well I've been I guess I'm famous for doing that.
The last thirty years where I'd write prescriptions, which would be going to play with your puppy or draw dragons or go dancing. But what I do is actually ask people what do you do that. When you do it, you lose track of time. You're so absorbed in the activity. You're not worrying about the future, you're not feeling guilty about the past. You're just absorbed in that activity. And often you you know, some people would say I don't have anything like that, and they were the really sick ones.
And other people wuld say, oh, yeah, I used to do ballroom dancing, or I used to paint, or I used to garden, and you'd inquire and you'd see how that their illness actually deteriorated when they stopped doing those activities. So I would prescribe. I'd get a script pat out, I've been seeing patients this morning. Actually I get to that out, and I'd actually write you gardening three times a week or no ballroom dancing three times a week. I'd say, you know, put this on your fridge. This
is your prescription. This is what you need to do. And it was amazing the change you're getting people. Yes, and either when you get people to talk about the things they love. Because as a doctor, you know you're asking about their pain and you know to travel here and there and how does it come on and off? So you're asking people about negative things in their lives. I would take a pleasure history. What are the most fun things you have in your life? What's your reason
for living? What are the things you do but you really enjoy? And when people start to talk about those things, their voice changes, their posture changes. You can see them in live and in front of you, just as they're sharing with you, you know, the activities that they really enjoyed. And that was really powerful to focus on. So I mean one example, I remember I had an old patient
who was a Vietnam vest. He'd broken everybody bone in his body as a paratrooper, and he had this chronic pain condition and he was getting pathodene injections and there was not even off station in his body to put the injections because it was all Frey brosed up. But the one thing he did with fly remote control aeroplanes. This is in the nineteen nineties and when he was focusing on and he was like an Australian champion at it. But when he was focusing on airplanes. His pain wasn't
an issue. Wow, But the rest of.
The time it was.
So you know, having something that you love to do and you focus on that, that's actually medicine and that's what i'd prescribe.
So yeah, I do that commonly, isn't it? Do you find it? Probably people listen to you and respect you
a lot more than they do me. But I find it interesting sometimes when people talk to you about, you know, if they're flat or they're depressed or they're anxious, and we'll talk about, you know, doing something that is like we spoke about like playing hanging out with your animals or being in nature or listening to music or meditating, or they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, But what do you think is xanax?
Yeah?
I'm like, well, one, I'm not a doctor, but two, you know, why don't we like are We're a culture that seems to have more faith in drugs than I mean, there are so many things that can lower your heart rate and lower your blood pressure and reduce anxiety and that that don't involve any kind of drug. So I've got a poem for this.
At the start of the pandemic, I was thinking you know, because I've studied all these complimentary medicines. I've written all these research papers on them. So I saying, what are all the activities you can do at home with no cost, no training, and no equipment that have research evidence that they reduce anxiety, improve immunity. And yeah, they've got evidence behind them. So I've started writing these out and it came and it came out of the poem. So this
I'm sort of I'm proud of this point. It's got fifty activities in it, but hear it. If you go to my website, you can click on each of these activities and it will link to the research behind it.
Do you know what, We've never in five years and one thousand and nearly eleven hundred episodes, never had anyone share a pime. So this is the debut for typ pimes.
And this is a systematic review poem, so it's evidence based poem. I call it The Whorl of Wellness and it goes like this, hold someone's hand, gaze into their eyes, go barefoot in nature, bask in sunrise, choose a dance partner and go find your groove, do tight your yoga and mindfully move share a massage, enjoy healing, touch, Focus on one thing and don't think too much. Make time for a hobby, play chess, fly kite, make use of
your hands, draw paint, so or right. Help someone in need, Donate to a cause, play games, meditate, read stuff from bookstores, turn off your screens, get a good sleep, declutter, spark, joy and love what you keep. Dig around in the garden, pick up a guitar, Slip into a bathtub, sauna or spa. Care for a pet, take up a sport, Go on vacation and make your home a resort. Lie in a hammock, relieve pent up stress, relax and do nothing and then
do even less. Laugh out loud, share a joke, give someone a kiss, say a prayer, chant a mantra, and follow your bliss.
So that that's pretty amazing. I love that. Where can people find that mark on my website?
Doctor mark dot co, d r M A r C dot co and forward, slash poems and uh all research backed. That's all research back. So each one of those activities has a link to the to the systematic review or the randomized control trial that that's backing backing it, And I give I think of that that that poem to my patience. I say, you have include as many of these activities in your life if you can.
You know what I laughed is just before when you said I've been seeing patients this morning and you held up a script pad there, I would think, one because you're a medical doctor, and two because you're writing. Even if it's like go dancing, or even if it's you know, fifteen minutes a day line the floor with your dog, you know, or twice a day, but it's on a script pad. It's given to me by a doctor. I'm much more likely to do it. That's it. You just
told me to do it. I'm less likely. But if you write it out on a script I feel like, well, shit, this is clinical. I've got to do this.
That's right, and put it on your fridge, you know, the fringe magnet. Yeah, so it gives it some authority to do that. At the moment, I just write script of medical cannabis, so I don't really write other other scripts.
Oh well, now you're going to get in undated. I don't need more patient. Don't really know. One of the things that we've spoken about, I reckon five times in a thousand episodes. I'm interested in your take on it. And in fact, Tiff and I spoke about a guy that we've both spoken with a bit called Professor Jeffrey Reddicker from Harvard, who is a researcher but specializes or spends a lot of time and effort researching spontaneous healing and plus ebos and all of that.
What do you think of all that? Where do you sit with the you know, our ability to heal ourselves from things that apparently are death sentences or terminal Yeah, I mean, I believe nature has infinite healing power. And I've because I've been in this natural medicine world for thirty plus years, I've seen so many cases of dramatic healing.
I mean, I'm a good friend with Ian Gawler. Yeah, he's a case study of you know, he had these cannonball lesions in his lungs and the bony cancers all the way through his lungs and given six weeks to live and what forty years later he's still around and you know, transformed his life through you know, sort of meditation and you know, lifestyle change. So I've seen some really dramatic turnarounds. Yes, and I mean if you have a look what humans are capable of, it's mind blowing.
You know, some of these amazing YouTube videos of what people can do.
And now how to turn that on?
Because one thing to say, Okay, there's these examples of it, how do you actually activate it? And some of those activities in my poem and those activities, but when you lose track of time so you're sort of at one with the universe, that's there. They're the activities that can potentially turn that on, But there is no answer of how to you know, switch that on for everybody, and not that you want to. I mean, in Western medicine, we see death as the enemy and you know, fight
it at all costs. But I've seen people have amazing, beautiful, really wanted and welcome death and they were really successful. But Western medicine still sees that as a as a failure a deare.
So.
Yeah, I think we have incredible power. I mean, the whole placebo effect. I mean, it's so powerful you have to control for it and all these experiments because it works. Yeah, it works a lot of the time.
What about one of the great challenges, especially twenty twenty three, I think it has been around forever really, but post pandemic, there's a lot of conversation around anxiety. Is anxiety produced more by the situation and circumstance or more by the individual in the middle of it? Oh, certainly by the individual.
And a lot of the stuff I've been teaching people now and working on is how you can remain really calm and relaxed in the midst of a really chaotic and stressful situation. So there's things like I did a too with Bim Half and you know, how to teaching people how to stay in an ice bath, which is not really comfortable, but how do you then relax when
you're in an ice bath? And the work we did with Lauren actually the Lauren burn 'osing a gold medice in taekwondo, and she was one of my PhD students, and we investigated these world champion athletes who'd be multiple world champions and said, how do you stay in the top of the world in your sport for so many years? I mean, what you eat, what do you think? How
do you live? And we found out that they all did ice bathing, and they did it for the mental health benefits of how to relax in a stressful situation, and I think that's a really important skill. I mean, yoga gives you that skill. When you do a yoga stretch, you sort of go to the edge of your stretch, and there's a point that I call the point of forced mindfulness. That's the point where your body says, don't go any further, you're going to hurt yourself. You don't
stretch any further. And if you do stretch, if you try and push past that, you're going to tear a muscle and you reduce your flexibility. If you just go to that point of where you're feeling quite stress and you're at the edge of your tolerance, and then you practice relaxing and breathing, so you're relaxing in that stressful situation. The same thing happens in a sauna or an ice ba.
There's a point where your body says, get out too much, when you're about to tap out, and at that point, if you can just relax and practice being relaxed under stress, that builds up your resilience. But if you do that what I recommend, and this naturally happens in the op class, so you know you're doing your stretches and your stretch one side and the other side, and you go to the point of that no forced mindfulness well being comfortably uncomfortable.
So you're practice being relaxed under stress. But then at the end of the class, you go into Shavasena at the corpse pose and you do a deep relaxation and then you're practicing relaxing while you're relaxed.
And when you do that, you.
Go much deeper into the relaxation because you've stressed yourself earlier, so the contrast between the stress and the relaxation is greater. And when you really relax deeply like that, all your stress hormones can't fall back into balance, your mental activity comes back into balance, and you really get in touch with your inner self. That's a great time to make decisions if you have to have to make an important decision, because you're in touch with yourself literally, and it's a
really good time to heal. That's when your body doesn't healing. So yeah, I really encourage people to go to the limits of their stress and practical relaxing while they're stressed, but then balance that with having a deep relaxation and practicing being relaxed while you're relaxed.
Shout out to Lauren. If Lauren's listening, we love you your ace and thanks for connecting the doc and us. It's much appreciated. Yeah, that's that, that equanimity, that calm in the chaos, right, That being able to, you know, despite what's going on around you self regulate and to be able to James Bond effect. Right.
We love about James Bond because you know, there's all these chaos going around, but he knows who to shoot and who to care for you to go through and you know.
Yeah, how do I make good decisions and do smart things and act and react the way that is optimal in the middle of the ship that's going that's right, that's going on around.
But the way to do it is you create a ship best and you practice doing that and then when life throws it at you, then you can deal with it.
That's so true. Is like we in fact back to TIFFs. So TIFF's training for this thing that will remain nameless,
but it's going to be horrible potentially. And so I said to her, like the other day, I've been getting it to do things that a lot of them are fucking horrible and I go, you need to be used to horrible because if we just get you traditionally fit, you know, that's great, But if we're doing it in a methodical, reasonable, comfortable, sensible way, when you get in the middle of this thing that you're training for where it isn't predictable, it isn't nice, it isn't comfortable, it
isn't familiar, it's freezing, you're in the middle of water, you're here, you're there. There's all this shit going on that you haven't dealt with. You know, for me, even as an exercise physiologist, I think it's thirty percent about your body and seventy percent about all the other stuff.
You know, so me trying to get and the same with you know, I've worked with lots of professional athletes, and you know, understanding what their body needs to be doing to execute what they need to do for their sport or task or activity is fundamental. But you can get any brilliant, genetically gifted athlete who's beautifully trained, but if they can't perform under pressure, they're fucked. You can't be a Lauren Burns, no matter how great your body
or genetics or skill or talent is. If you can't go to the Olympic Games and under extreme pressure execute, you know. And that's the thing is, so it's like, yeah, fit, strong, functional, specifically trained, well nourished, well slept, you know, all the physiological buttons pushed. Yep, sure, but can you deal with shit? Can you do what most people would give up on?
That's where you know, you can recreate a ship storm and practice it, exhibiting the ship storm and then and then then you actually feel it. That does It builds your physiological resilience. It also builds your confidence because when you can do that, you feel like you can handle anything. You feel invincible. And yeah, that's what I really know. I love teaching people that and I do a lot through bathing because bathings. Most people think bathing's really comfortable.
You know, you go to hot springs and your line in hot water, it's really and it is, that's super relaxing and super comfortable. But you go into an ice bath and after a minute or two you really want to get out, Or you go into a sauna and after you know, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, you really want to get out because your body is suffering and dealing with that and actual you've got another little poem here. So the last poem was all about the chronic things
you can do to keep yourself relaxed. So this is in the acute situation, when the ship storm is hitting you, there's what you want to do is activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Because normally, you know when the ship storm hits, you've got your sympathetic nervous system where it's fight and flight, you're up and your adrenalines up. But when you're in fight and flight, often that's fearful and your brain turns off. In that fight and fight, you don't want to think
about it. You want to act instinctively, so you don't have tiger or should I do this? All that. But if you can calm yourself down, you can make a better decision. And there's a way to do that to stimulate your rest and digest your parasympathetic nervous system. And there are things you can do with your body, very simple things that will activate your parasympathetic nervous system. And like all these things, the ten hacks to relax, and
it's super simple. It's touch all your fingers, wiggle your toes, soften your stomach, breathe through your nose, thy smile, wallow thing, flutter your eyelids, and focus within. Now, all of those activities activate your parasympathetic nervous system. And there all activities you do when you're safe in your cave, when you're running away from tig or fighting a battle.
It's so smart that you do that. I mean, it's so smart that you you're teaching people, you know, because people can memorize that quite easily and recall that you.
I was teaching to a patient this morning with PTSD and anxiety and having panic attacks. And when the panic attack comes on, if you've got things you can do that give you a sense of control, but they actually calm your nervous system. And this is you know the you know the power of vaguel. You know the Vagel theory where you can have sympathetic nervous system high because you're in a high adrenaline situation, but then you can increase your vagual activity, your parasympathetic so you can still
be relaxed in that chaotic situation. And that's when you make the best decisions. That's when you can get the edge over your component, your opponent, and where you for much better. So it's how do you stop panicking and stay calm when the ship storm hits?
And these sort of tricks can help, so you can be cognitively and physiog logically optimal at the same time. Now, maybe forty percent of my audience, I'm guessing, do not know who wim Hoff is. I do. I'm a fan, tiff you and I of course don't you. Yeah, yep, one tell us who he is and tell us what you did with him.
So whims they call him the iceman. So he sort of made ice fading quite famous. He has a method that involves breathing where you breathe as much as you can so hyperventilate and blow off all your carbon dogs side and get dizzy and lightheaded and really uncomfortable, and then you hold your breath for as long as you can. And it just happens when you if you blow off all your carbon dogs side, then hold your breath. You can hold your breath for a long time, and anyone
can do that. And then he also promoted he had the world record for many years of the longest spent in an ice bath over an hour. He can spend in full ice and control his body temperature, and then no one could believe that he could train anyone else to do that.
And they actually tested him.
They did some research on him where they gave him in with the poison around E.
Coli.
So it's it's pretending you've got a blood infection without active bacteria. So it's the lipoprotein coat around the bacteria. That's what your body reacts to when you've got septacemia or blood infection. So they gave that to him and he did his breathing, did his thing, and he didn't get affected by it at all, and they couldn't believe. And he's this amazing charismatic dutch Man who's got a lot of bravado and a lot of self confidence. And they said, you know, oh yeah, you can do that
because you're a freak. He goes, no, I can teach anyone to do it, And they said, how long you take a year of training on? Take them on the weekend, and they said, oh yeah, sure, And he did it. He took a group of about twenty five people away in Poland and I think it maybe he took him for five days or a week and trained him on the training them on the breathing, trained them on the
ice bathing. They did end up walking up a mountain in the snow in their in their board shorts, and a week later they all tested with the same injection of what should have been except to see me, which gives you fever and chills and pains for twenty four hours, and they were able to do it as well. So he has this whim half method, which is the breathing and the ice bathing, where he trains people to overcome their own sort of body, their own physiology.
And he came to.
Australia about five years ago, ess actually living up in NUSA at the moment, I think, and I sort of toured with him, giving the lecture on the signs behind the whim Holf method. And it was really interesting for me to formula research there because I'd already done a lot of research on breathing practices and bathing practices and stuff.
So I sort of condensed that together. And so you know, we went to Brisbane and Sydney in Melbourne and we had like five hundred people would come to an event and they'd all do two minutes in an ice bath. And when you do two minutes on an ice bath. You feel amazing when you get out in this endorphin rush and you feel really powerful. So they're really sort of high vibing events, and so I travel with him.
I ended up doing some research which you never fully got published, that where we in survey one of my PhD students surveyed about four thousand people doing the wim hoffmet and saying, you know, why do you do it? What effects do you get? What are the benefits? And it was amazing that people get incredible benefits from PTSD and anxiety, from depression, and from back pain and joint pains and fibromyalgia and chronic pain. They were like the
big ticket items that people got benefits from. And I think it's especially with the anxiety and the PTSD, is like when you go into an ice bath, you naturally you had to ventilate, and that reproduces the breathing pattern and the body chemistry of anxiety of trauma.
You know, when I.
Was working in emergency departments, you'd have people coming into the emergency department thinking they having a heart attack, but they're hype of ventilating. They're having a panic attack. But it's the same sort of feeling that you're having well you're about to die and having a panic attack, and you can simulate that by going to an ice bath. But then if you can control your breathing and overcome that, it gives you the chance, well, I can overcome this panic.
And it can be dangerous if you've had really severe trauma in the past and you do that to someone unexpected, you can reactivate that trauma. But if you do that in a very controlled environment where they can get out anytime they want, they're in full control of the situation. There's a hot bath or a sawn or something that can warm up so they're not going to freeze, then they can actually reproduce that previous trauma, that panic in
a way that they're in control of it. And then they can overcome and they can control their breath and relax their breathing down, and suddenly they've got mastery over their own body when they didn't have it before, and that could be super powerful. And often when you're doing big public events or five hundred people sitting in nice bars, you need to watch out for the people who are getting triggered by that who and with a bit of coaching, pretty much everybody gets through it. But it's a really
empowering thing for people to do. But you do have to be a little bit careful because people are more sensitive. To give people that feeling of control over panic, it's such a gift to give to people, do you know.
You know, so I remember hearing about that where he was in that hospital and they injected him with that whatever it was that made people. Typically it would make people really unwell for a period of time, and he went give it to me, and they gave it to him and he was completely fine and there. Yeah, and then he trained all those people that were not handpicked by him. I don't think.
I think they're actually chosen by the researchers or whatever.
Yeah.
No, and I hadn't done anything special before, and no, just hear I can't like.
What I don't get is why does that not blow everyone's socks off. Let's research that. Let's lean into like, here's all of these people doing shit that is not meant to be possible. Why are we not pushing into that? Is it because it makes no money?
There's no money in it? I mean what I mean, He's and now you know all the stuff in that poem I just read. You know, those activities don't cost anything, and they don't make money for any organizations, do they. That's right, Well, suddenly, I mean the wellness industry and
the spa industry in Hot Springs. I mean, yes, pretty nice and boring, but it's not it's not really a blockbuster drug that you make a billion dollars or you know, many bultiple billions of dollars out of a molecule by doing that.
These are activities. I mean.
So for example, I really I've got to I think I call the cold water hokey pokey, which is a way of so because after the wim Hoff thing and traveling in the ice bathing, I was going to lectures in a plays like wing Gana, which is like in this luxury health retreat and tell people to you know, going to use cold water. And most people say, I know, we hate cold water. We can't tolerate it, you know,
because people are pretty wimpy generally. So I thought, and you know, wim just do it, you know, get in there.
And but you know, the people who come to whim Hoffa then, or the alpha males or the alpha females or they you know, the fighters and the martial artists and the footballer, and I was talking to elder women and people who are more sort of relaxed, so though, there must be a way to do this that's gentle, and I came up with this what I call the cold water hokey pokey, And you can do it at home in the shower.
It doesn't cost any money.
You so just basically you start off with a hot shower, and then at the end of your nice hot shower, you turn the heat up a little bit so you become a bit uncomfortably hot and a bit flushed. And at that point you stand back and you turn the
hot water off and the cold water on. But you just get your left foot it's okay, you've been really hot, and you put your left foot can handle the cold water, and then you put your left leg in, and you put your right foot and your leg and then your left hand and arm and your other hand and arm. And what that does it constricts the blood in your limbs and sends that hot blood into the core of your body. But you're still feeling okay even though you've
got the cold water on your limbs. And then you keep breathing calmly, and you smile to yourself, because that's what it's all about.
How do you stay calm and you.
Have that inner piece, and then then you take a big breath in, and before you put your left side in, you start to sigh out. And then you put your left side in, and when the water hits your neck and your sort of upper body. Normally that would when you go oh, it would make you have a big gasp because your blood vessels are close to the surface there, and that gives you that shock. But if you're already going as you do that, you feel the cold, but you don't get the shock, so it takes the emotional
reaction away from it. So you take a big sigh and you put your left side in, your right side in, your front side in, and you turn yourself around and you keeping calmly and smile to yourself because that's what it's all about. And then you put your whole head in and then you move your head around, you know, standstill, get a drenching, slowly, turn yourself around, continue breathing, calmly,
smile to yourself. That's what it's all about. And then you can put the cold water on your kidneys when you're growing and on your armpits there are places where your blood vessels are close to the surface, chills your body a little bit, and you'll find after doing that, you'll be standing in the cold water and you say, oh, it's all right, I can do this. And at that point you're breathing calmly, you're in the cold water. You
get out and you start your day. And it takes about a minute, like literally one minute to do that. And if you do it, you started your day singing and dancing. You come out feeling amazingly alive and invincible. Your hair and your skin improoves because cold water actually is really good for your hair and your skin, and you feel like you can do anything. And the hardest part of that whole thing is the decision to do it. It doesn't cost any money, it doesn't take any time.
I mean saves money, you're saving hot water. But that decision to do it is that barrier.
But if you can.
Overcome that barrier, that procrastination barrier, that can then have like a rollover effect for the rest of your life. So that difficult conversation you want to you had to have, or that job that shitty job you really didn't want to do. Suddenly okay, I can just do it, and you just make the decision to do it, and you do it knowing that it's not the best thing to do. You know, it's not the most fun thing to do, but it's actually fun overcoming.
That hurdle once we get fully immersed, Mark, once I'm all in head, yeah, everything pits knackers are how how long do I stay and need to stay under there? Thirty sixty?
Not even just to the point where you're breathing comfortably, right, so that once you're breathing comfortably, you've that's the biggest hurdle. Now there is an added benefit if you can get to the point where you become shivery, right, so at the point of you're not shivering and a chattering, but if you're a little bit shivery, then what you've dropped, you've dropped your body temperature, and that does things like activate brown fat, which helps you burn white fat, and
that turns on your metabolism, has other benefits. But just the benefit of overcoming the cold and showing that you can actually overcome a difficult situation. I be calm just to the point where you're in the cold, breathing calmly. That's all you need At that point, you're good to go.
Well, if you know what today's activity is, don't you.
Thanks?
Hi, Mark, You're amazing. We know you've got another podcast coming up. How do people find you? Follow you, connect with you, read your poems and learn more about you and your work.
So my website is dtor Mark dr M A r C dot Co. I post a bit on Facebook and on LinkedIn. I'm not really on Instagram. I need to up my social media, but yeah, on my website of Facebook or LinkedIn the main sort of avenues, they can email me info I n FO at doctor Mark dot co.
They can email me for people you want to communicate with me at all.
Yeah, and I'm upgrading my website. But all my poems and stuff are there at the moment, and they're all free and I'm happy to share.
Well, we would love to have you back because you're a killer, But we'll say goodbye. We'll say goodbye off air in a moment, but for the minute, thanks so much. Come and have a chat with us on typ We really appreciate it.
I've been a pleasure, Craig, and I'm good luck with your training teat sounds like you can be doing. Thank you, Mark.
It'd be rude for me to have a favorite on typ but I think I just have one. I think Mark's just Yeah, you're amazing.
I love that. Well, I've got more poems I can share next time. Yeah, stay there, mate, we'll say goodbye. Thanks everyone.
Now you've got lots of things to action, because that was fantastic.