I'll get a team. It's it's Tiff, it's doctor Gillespie, It's it's me, Fatty Harps. It's the you project. We'll start with the pugilist who's going through some emotional and hormonal and psychological and sociological issues. Nothing big, just just ticking all the fucking catastrophe boxes. It's a day to day proposition and I'm scared to ask, but what's the what's the update?
You know?
I opened my eyes in the morning and I just wonder who I'm going to be?
Who am I going to be today?
Yeah? Well you look, I mean, you look happy and how fucking big? I just looked at your face. How big are those glasses?
Yeah?
But fucking cool?
Are they very studious?
Yeah? How smart do I look?
Yes?
Very?
Oh twice a smart? Yeah?
Thank you twice?
Is big?
Thank you?
You should You should get goalsspar at some stage to do a deep dive on Perry menopause so he can tell you what to do for the next few years.
Can you fix me? You fix me?
Ship is anywhere, dear beause, no perimenopause.
She's just like she's walking down the corridor to the door that says menopause, and I'm not throwing her under the bus. This has been spoken about ad nauseum on the podcast everyone, so I don't think, oh my god, that's divulging her private matters. No, she spoke about it at length. How are you feeling today? Do you still want to punch someone or are you better?
Well?
It was another night of crap sleep, so and that doesn't help me. Crap sleep and very tired and no energy. But I went for a really light, short three.
K jog before and I feel good after that.
But it's just trying to balance that with not blowing myself out completely.
Well, if you want to increase your dough for me. And there's a new product out called Scrollamine, which you were calling scroll of Mine, which is ridiculous, and David and I corrected you.
I'll make I've got it on film. I'll make a thing and put it on your Instagram.
That's no, I hate you. You meant to make me look good.
Even Meliss is the boss and I'll go straight to the top with this one.
Third on the ladder, Doctor Gillespie, welcome to the show. We haven't even spoken to you. How are you?
Yeah? Good? No, just you know for new listeners. I'm not a doctor, despite what Craig says, but we will talk about medical stuff today despite not being a doctor.
Well, of course we will. How are your hormones going?
Are you?
Are you any menopause?
Man?
You know the thing called called andro pause? Have you heard it?
Is there? Really?
No?
I haven't heard of that and probably haven't experienced. I don't know, feel normal the same way as I always do.
Yeah, well, you do live a very healthy lifestyle. What's news on planet you? How's how's everything going? You still do you need me to come up with my money? Will be't help you? Just transfer some of it from room to room?
You pay me?
Can I can? I? No, I can't say it. I can't say it. I was going to say something about the U Project conference, but I can't say it. But maybe sooner I'll be able to say what I'm going to say. Everyone is there's a reasonable chance there's a reasonable chance that not doctor but David Gillespie will be at the conference, if not this year, next year. But we're trying to get it. We're just my guys are talking to his guys.
Yeah, yeah, the.
People are talking, Yes, Tiff, is he going to just stand behind a black screen so no one can see his face.
We know what it looks like.
Then no, I will be behind a black screen.
Yeah, well tell everyone why you said that, Tiff.
Because we've never, ever, ever ever seen his face. This could be some AI David Gillespie never true camera on.
It could be it probably is.
What's happened.
Imagine the lawsuit when the real David Gillespie gets hold of some.
Of these episodes. Well what Tiff is saying everyone, which you're probably gleamed, but just if you haven't, I'll be clear. David leaves his camera off and he's never, ever, in any episode, for one minute, ever had it on. So Tiff and I have ours on and we can see each other's very handsome faces, and but we look at a black square, to be honest, more accurate, a rectangle with his name in it? Is that? Why is that? Is that? Because you don't think we're going to be
able to cope with your face? What is that about?
Yeah? The beauty, it will just blow your way. No, I just I can relax more when I'm not on Telly. I hate seeing myself on Telly, even even this Telly and I need to be relaxed to do this well, and so I prefer to do it, and you let me do it.
So I do well. You do a very good job. But I can hear water splashing, so I'm operating the assumption that you're in the bath.
So I really I think the water must be splashing at TIFFs place.
Yeah, no, no, I can see her. There's no water involved. So you wrote an article recently about the fact that which I have not read, but I only heard about it just before we went live. My bad didn't do any research because I thought you'd rock up as you often just do and go nah, let's talk about this or that. But completely my fault. But the relationship between using our phone and ADHD that it might be correlated.
Well, the title of the article is is your phone giving you ADHD? And for the ADHD listeners who just want to get to the point, the answer is yes, thanks and see you later. We'll catch you next week.
Thank you very much. The answer is yes, yeah, that's been David Gillespie. You see every second Thursday, all right.
So yeah, but let's dig in for the rest of your listeners and get to the bottom of it. This is prompted. The reason I wrote this article is there was an article last week in all the papers about the new South Wales government announcing that they were going to allow GPS to do ADHD diagnosis, which until now and in every other state is still restricted to specials I think psychiatrists too. So you have to you have to lay down some some serious green to get an
ADHD diagnosis. And what they're saying is, well, that's backing up the system because the number of diagnoses is growing like crazy, and you know there's many, many more people who need the diagnosis than who are capable of, you know, being diagnosed by the existing health workforce. So we're going to our GPS do it. I guess the underlying question there is why do we suddenly have so many people
needing diagnosis? And it's a question that's been raised in a lot of places in the UK and the US, and that's because when you look at the numbers they're pretty horrifying. If you look in the UK, recorded ADHD diagnosis shot up twentyfold, so not just twice, twenty times between two thousand and twenty eighteen.
So thousand percent.
Yeah, So that's not nothing. That's that's a lot, and it's climbing an average of eighteen percent every year, so that's a very very significant. The US are similar similar stats there there are I think diagnosis went up. No, I didn't put their numbers in there, but they're similar numbers,
same sort of numbers from memory. And if we look at medications, which is people might say, well, what does an ADHD diagnosis get you, Well, it gets you access to medication, which we've talked about before, which is essentially unfetter means. So an ADHD diagnosis gets you access to stimulant medication, and we're going to talk a little bit about why and what the mechanism is there and why
that works. But if we look at medication sales in Australia, which is the most reliable source of statistics when you come to when it comes to medicine in Australia, because you can't fudge medication sales and they're published public data.
So there were two per thousand people in two thousand and four, two thousand and five receiving medication for ADHD, So two thousand and four, two thousand and five, two per thousand by twenty twenty three, twenty four that was twenty two per thousand, so an elevenfold increase between two thousand and four and twenty twenty three. That's pretty crazy. We've got numbers going nuts when it comes to ADHD. And the big question, both in the US, the UK
and here is why why is that happening? Why is this medical condition that was barely recognized, barely known before the turn of the century suddenly affecting so many people now. Part of the official explanation you get for that is, ah, it's because there's more publicity about it. You know, you and I talking about it today, we're talking about it. It will make people interested in it. They'll go and I'll see their doctor, et cetera. So there's more public
awareness about the condition. Some people say, oh, it's the you know, it's the modern gluten free. You know, it's the trendy thing to have. It's gone from a disease that you didn't want to have because it was viewed as a pretty disease of the lowest socioeconomic classes, because it was generally considered to be caused by economic stress and you know, difficulties in families and so on and so. But now it's transitioned to a disease where you know,
it's sort of the disease de jure. So that's one explanation that's banded about. Another one is that the diagnosis has gotten a lot looser and doctors are just diagnosing it more because of the change in the diagnostic criteria for it, which happened in twenty thirteen. All of those things maybe, but they're all kind of wooly explanations for something that has got some pretty hard numbers behind it.
And I think anyone who realistickly thought about it and said, well, look, maybe at the edges, those things are causing those rises, but there must be something seriously underlying this. And the clue to the fact that there probably is is that what is often diagnosed with ADHD is anxiety, and anxiety diagnosis has also gone through the roof, so in that time, in the last probably decade, it's more than doubled in Australia. So we've got anxiety going up, we've got ADHD going
absolutely off the charts. What could the possible explanation for that be? And I don't buy this business about diseased azure or doctors just being a little bit more free and easy with diagnosis. That's just not happening. It might be happening a little bit, but it's not really. And you and I have talked about this in the past about the last time or when ADHD was first sort
of recognized as being a condition that needed treatment. So remember I talked about the Bradford Home in New York where there were kids after the Second World War who were sent because they were suffering from what would today be described as ADHD. So they were hyperactive, they were difficult to deal with it. They described them as rambunctious.
And these were kids coming from broken homes, from depression era homes with parents who had been sent off to war and so on, and who were having a hard hard time of it. And they happened across aqure. For the idea was in the home that they'd keep them there, isolated from all the nastiness. They'd feed them, they'd clothe them, they'd let them play in the woods, and it actually helped you keep them there for three months you would
be able to turn them around. But they happened across something really really odd, which is that amphetamines that at the time were being used to force soldiers who are suffering from combat fatigue otherwise known as PTSD or what we would today describe as PTSD or anxiety, could be given amphetamines and they'd get them through it. Wouldn't cure anything, but they get them through it, they'd be able to
fight again, et cetera. Trying these drugs out on kids who had symptoms of ADHD, and let's just remind ourselves what those symptoms are, which is really difficult to focus. So in boys that manifests as hyperactivity, if you like, you know, scatting around from one thing to the next, you know, wanting to move physically, difficulty with impulse control, et cetera. In girls that often manifests as day dreams.
You know, a bit of a day dreamer, you know, whenever you can't get them to focus on anything, they're looking out the window. Their brain's not on the subject. So those are the symptoms. And what they found was if you gave amphetamines to those kids, bang brand new works out of the box. Just give them this drug and they can focus again. Their cognition goes back up, they can do their schoolwork, they can do everything, just back to normal again. And the trouble was it only
lasted about four hours. So you give them the amphetamine for as long as the amphetamine stays in their system, they're all good, and then as soon as it wears off, they're back to the way they were. In fact, possibly even slightly worse if you started to do it for long enough. So at the time, the doctors said, this isn't a solution. It's a band aid. We'll use it in an emergency situation, but it isn't actually solving anything. They didn't know the mechanism. But we do know the mechanism.
Now we now understand how the brain works and in this respect and why an amphetamine would make a difference. So what's happening in ADHD is that the set point that the brain has for how much dopamine it thinks it needs to focus is driven upwards by exposure to things which push up dopamine. So stress pushes up dopamine, and addictive behaviors or substances push up dopamine. So those kids were experiencing large amounts of stress, that was what
was pushing up the dopamine set point. But if they'd been in an environment, whether or exposed to a lot of addictive substances, etc. That would have been pushing And it's just just an adaptation of our brain to help us deal with a high dopamine producing environment, either because it's extremely stressful like in combat, or it's surrounded by a lot of addictive things, so that set point keeps
getting pushed up and up and up in those people. Now, when the set point goes up, you need more and more dopamine just to hit the baseline required for focus. Dopamine's job, by the way, is to make us focus. So in the reward system, it's to make us focus on rewards. So make us get out of bed and chase something, you know, preferably sex, because producing the next generation is the purpose of being alive at the end
of the day. And so yeah, sorry for the philosophers among the audience, but you know, biochemically, that's where we're at. And so dopo mean's job is to get us focused on that goal and get us moving. And on the on the other side of the equation, when something dangerous is happening, dove mean's job is to get us focused on getting away from it. So the reward there is
staying alive. So that's what happens, and that said point goes up in a high DOVA environment to make sure that we don't overreact to every little thing that's happening where there's lots of things happening. The problem is that when you do that to your brain, the amount of dopamine require to just keep you focused normally goes up, and you can't stay focused normally, and so you get a little bit scattery, and your brain's jumping around and you can't maintain the focus required to stay on one
line of thought. Now, people with ADHD describe this feeling like it's like they just can't stay on the one line of thought. It's like when you're trying to think
about something and then another thought. In truths, if you've ever i don't know, read a particularly invigorating book or you know that that has your board to tears and you can't You read a paragraph and then you realize you can't remember what the paragraph was about because you will thinking about something else while you were reading it. That kind of thing, but all the time with everything, so you just can't maintain a train of thought. And that is a symptom of not enough to overmean in
your brain. To keep you focused on a single thought, so.
Just hitting the pause but for one moment. So ADHD expressing in different people is almost a response to something happening in their external world. So a situation, a circumstance, environment, experience over time, and over time they for one of the better term get well, they become, you know, a person dealing with ADHD. So not genetic at all.
Well, as with everything, there's a there's a genetic baseline component. We all have different propensities to everything. Some of us are more easily addicted than others, some of us more easily have difficulty with stress than others. That's the nature of evolution, which is that on purpose. You know, this is why we don't clone ourselves to reproduce. We want the mixture of the na of mixing two people together
that enables us to be adaptable in any environment. And so the same thing's going on here with propensity, it's a normal curve. Most of us are in the middle. Most of us are around about the same. Some of us are much more in danger than others, and some of us are much less in danger than others.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, makes sense, So go ahead.
So the issue is Okay, well, if that's what ADHD is, if we boil it right down to the biochemistry, what is ADHD. It's dopamine being too low for the level that the brain expects. In other words, the level that the brain expects being too high for the available dopamine. If that was right, then we'd express we'd expect anxiety to be a problem as well, because anxiety is caused
by exactly the same setup. Biochemically, What happens when the dopamine set point is too high is that we overestimate risk. So we look at an environment, and you and I might be standing there looking at the environment at the exact same set of facts. You would see danger if your if your set point was too high, and I would say, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. So, and by the way, this is a thing between males and females, even if their set points are the same, is males
have a lower baseline set point than females. So they'll look at the same fact scenario and a male will say nothing to worry about here, and the female will say, actually, that looks pretty damn risky to me. I'm not doing it.
And that's why significantly I think it's three to four times as many teenage males are injured in accidental injuries and deaths than females because males are looking at the same situation as the females are saying there's nothing to worry about here, and the females are saying, yes, there is. I'm not doing it anyway. Slight slide track there.
I think we call that the doing dumb shit variable.
That's right, lowered impulse control, which is yeah, is why teenage male deaths are much higher than teenage female that's anyway, slightly off the point. The point is anxiety and ADHD you would expect to travel together because of that biochemistry, and in fact they do. And this is what puts paid to the arguments about oh, this is just the disease of the day, or doctors are just going crazy
and over diagnosing this thing. Is If that's true, then they're doing it to anxiety too, and I don't think anyone wants to be diagnosed with anxiety. So the problem then is there's something else going on. What could be pushing all of us collectively massively twenty twofold in the stats, all of us higher. What could be pushing our set
point higher. And the answer is one we discussed before, which is we have distributed a means of pushing that set point higher to the entire population from twenty ten onwards. And that's the phones. The phones have apps embedded on them which are purposely designed to generate a dopamine hit. The reason they're designed to do that is because that's how they get the thing they sell, which is your attention. There are hundreds of thousands of free apps you can
put on your phone. The winner is the one that keeps your attention best. The only way to keep your attention is by using the addictive mechanisms that they know how to manipulate, which is how to generate a dopamine hit in your brain. We've distributed that to every person
and made it entirely accessible twenty four to seven. And then we're going to stand back and say we're surprised when the consequence of that is the entire higher population has their dopamine set point moved up to the level where we've all got ADHD.
Yeah, yeah, yep. That's why when I watch a puppy video, which is about you know, every eight minutes fifty seven more come flooding into my fucking you know awareness. Yeah yeah, so, I mean that is the that's the commodity that they're vying for. Right is our is our brand, Our attention is our focus. And because we can't if we're not paying attention, we can't buy the shit they're selling.
Well, they're metrics there there. When the product is free. Do you think it's free to make Facebook or Instagram or video games or pornography? None of that's free. It's all really expensive, but you can access it for free. You know, when the product's free, you're the product. So so true, and so you don't spend billions of dollars doing this and then hand give it out. They're giving it out because they know it contains an addiction mechanism and that will keep you engaged with it.
Yeah yeah yeah.
So it's like the drug dealers say, you know, the first one is free.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. And so I mean, I guess there's no I was going to say simple solution, Like the solution is simple, but it's not easy, especially when you know there's so much I mean.
I reckon, Well, the reason it's not easy is because it's an addiction ye, I'm going to if if it were easy, that would be proof that everything I just said is rubbish, because then you're not addicted.
Yeah, isn't it. Yeah, it's so easy to get up in the morning and without things, king, grab your phone and just see what what do I need to see?
It's like, yeah, and I guess the test for anyone who's wondering about this and sitting there and saying, oh, I could stop this anytime, you know, that's right, a lot of rubbish. I'm not addicted. Okay, well then do it, but don't just delete the app, which you know in the back of your mind you can just put back on tomorrow and you probably will delete your account, delete your account. Do that.
Yeah.
I won't get too many takers on that one, I bet.
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's analogous to you know, you're not calling your dealer. You don't call him anymore. That's like and now I'm going to get him shot. So maybe that's a little bit of a stretch. Do you reckon you're addicted tip to your phone? Yeah? Yes, yeah.
Do you ever experience the symptoms I described for eighty h which is the inability to maintain a persistent train of thought all of the time.
Yeah, I was diagnosed two years ago to ish.
There you go. Yeah, Yeah, And will you given amphetamines to assist with it?
Yeah? And I don't. Yeah. I struggle with them brand time on them.
And what I guess I'm getting to here is there's another way, which I'm not denying. See, there's a tendency when you read the literature on ADHD, there's a tendency for people to sort of dismiss it and say this is made up. People are just going trying to get this diagnosis because they, you know, they think it's a good die trendy diagnosis to get or whatever, or doctors are doing it for the money. I don't think either
of those things are true. I think it's genuinely real that we are in the middle of an epidemic of ADHD, and it is a very big problem because it's just the first symptom of a long line of things that result from that biochemistry, starting with anxiety and depression and ultimately, in some cases, psychosis and suicide. So these are not trivial things we're talking about. And when we start talking about large chunks of the population having that first sign
the ADHD. We've got real things to worry about. And the other side of this coin, I guess is there are solutions to this. If we go back to what they were doing in that hospital before they discovered the drug. They were saying the solution here is spent three months mucking around in the fields. In other words, train yourself to focus on something other than what is causing that don't mean level to rise, and we can do that too.
And as much as I hate recommending herbal Gerbil solutions to anything, meditation is exactly that.
It is not, David Gillespie, that's AI, what did you do with gospo?
Well, you know, I hate even using the word right, but if you if you boil meditation down to its core, what it is is requiring you forcing yourself to focus on just one thought, and every time you stray from that thought, forcing yourself back to it. You are, by doing that, retraining your brain to focus. And you are also biochemically bringing down that set point. So doing something like Tiff said before going for a run that does the same thing. So there are things you can do
to bring that set point down again. But part of this is you have to stop doing the things which were raising it in the first place.
Tiff, do you remember when you got back from your trip to India?
It was India, wasn't it you that's to ground for six.
Yeah, you were the least ADHD sense I've known you, like you were the most. I mean, you know sometimes when you talk to people and they're like they've got like fake carm and fake zen, and it's like, nah, I'm buy it. This is you just fucking pretending you're the Dellilama.
Because it's been a fortune on this stuff and you've got to say you've got something from it.
I'd say, when people tell me they're spiritual, I'm like, come on, come on, But you were. You were genuinely very different for about definitely a week, maybe a couple of weeks. Do you remember that months? No? No, no, but really noticeably for me, I'm like, you had very different energy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I went on Monday night to I haven't been for ages because I keep forgetting until seven thirty.
It starts at seven.
Buddhist meditation in Ellwood and I sit down they started, and I feel I can almost visualize that the change in my energy like everything, and I float out of there and and it makes me realize almost the visceral, toxic load of how I function, like the doing and the thinking and the it's like that coupled with the Buddhist teachings is far out.
It's powerful.
Yeah, well keep going. That is my suggestion.
There's other things you can do too, though, I mean if you, I mean it depends what skills you've got available. But one of the most powerful things people can do if they have this guide. I can't do this because I don't know how to do it, but if you can play a musical instrument, well, doing that for an hour is very powerful because the focus required to do
it is extraordinary. And you can you watch a kid with ADHD come out of a music lesson and they'll feel like you're describing native where where there They went in kicking and screaming, this is the last thing in the world I want to do. I don't know, I don't want to go anywhere near. This is horrible. And then they'll come out on cloud nine like you're describing, because they're getting that that pure focus, getting up to that that set point and feeling great, well.
Just becoming a concert pianist.
So there go just playing the piano. Tiff, does that have that effect?
It does, But you know what, lately it has felt it's very taxing as well when you're learning something like that brand new and just with my endg like shitty sleep lately and energy. I'll sit down and what I've noticed like clenching my jaw when I'm doing it all, like feeling really tense because I'm just so I don't know, it's it's funny, it's been funny. That's just been a recent once my sleep took a big dive again over.
The interesting thing about sleep is it's often an early warning sign. So there's a really interesting study I talked about in one of my books where sleep was able to predict a depression and anxiety diagnosis two years ahead of other symptoms. So sleep problems was a very very strong predictor of a depression and anxiety diagnosis up to two years ahead of where the symptoms would be, such that a diagnosis would be obvious or correlation. Well, there's
a there's a viable biochical explanation. Yeah, Well, the reason that the brain tries to cope with the lack of dopamine by keeping you awake because to stay awake you have to produce dopamine internally, so it's actually the brain trying to get a hit from the dopamine being produced by keeping you awake. So that's that's the biochemistry behind why sleep might be associated with anxiety depression and obviously with ADHD too, because it's on the same it's on
the same pathway. So yeah, there is there are studies that show that this in fact occurs, and there's a good biochemical explanation as to why it would occur.
Well, that's some good news for you, Tip, You've got that to look forward to.
Put that on my calendar. Thanks David.
Twenty seven depression midyear. Awesome, mate, thanks for just prophesying over TIFF's incoming mental health issues.
She'll sort it out, she'll learn to play the piano and that'll be the end of that.
Keep your crystal ball to yourself, will you just fucking around? We'll say goodbye, affair, but as always, mate, fascinating, Thank You're worried. To see you later.