How Kindness Boosts Your Immune System, The Power of Visualisation & The Importance of Empathy with Dr David Hamilton #602

0:00There was a study on doctor visits to over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu and they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition was 50 % higher than everyone else. and it just came down to empathy, how it made them feel. And what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system. Hey guys, how are you doing?

0:40Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. This is the time of year, at least in the UK, when people are gearing up for Christmas. Now, I'm well aware that Christmas represents different things to different people. And of course, not everyone chooses to celebrate it. But there is no question that in many countries around the world, this is a time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind, and spend time with the people we love. So to celebrate, I thought I would re-release a conversation that took place on this podcast almost six years ago now.

1:27with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher, and someone who is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on the science of kindness. He's also the author of multiple bestselling books, including Why Kindness is Good for You and How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body. Now, this conversation was actually recorded all the way back in February 2020, one month before the start of COVID. But as with most of the conversations on my podcast, the content within it is timeless and just as relevant today as it was when we first recorded it. In our conversation, we explore many different themes, including how empathy and kindness can impact various markers of our health, including our immune system and cardiovascular system.

2:23Why David calls oxytocin the kindness hormone, how exactly we can use visualization to improve the quality of our lives, the science of the placebo effect, the importance of connection and empathy in healthcare, and the phenomenal ripple effect of kindness, whereby one act of kindness can lead to 125 more. David is such a wonderful human being who is doing his very best to help create a kinder and more compassionate world. And I think this conversation is perfect for the current time of year. And I hope that it serves as a gentle reminder that being kind is not only good for the world around us, it's good for ourselves as well.

3:18So you've come down from? Dunblane, central Scotland. Famous laterally for Andy Murray and Jamie Murray, the tennis players, and obviously for the school shooting several years ago. Really lovely place, Dunblane. I took up tennis when I moved there in my mid-40s. I'd never played tennis before. Because of the Murray brothers? Because of the Murray brothers. See, it's frowned upon if you're fit and healthy and you don't play tennis, it's kind of frowned upon. That's amazing, isn't it? I picked up a racket for the first time in my mid-40s and I was awful. And now? Well, I'm working up through the league, so I've been doing a lot of mental exercises, visualisation, a lot of training and stuff.

3:56So I love it. Oh, fantastic. Play three, four times a week. That's so interesting that this small town, Dunblane, I wonder if we compare the tennis participation rates in Dunblane, you know, the home of Andy and Jamie Murray, or certainly the former home of them, with the rest of the United Kingdom. them i wonder if that if it's artificially skewed upwards probably definitely you know it's a really thriving tennis community yeah yeah well fantastic well you mentioned a couple of things there uh which we'll probably come to later on um but david i think i'm really fascinated by your journey so you started working in the pharmaceutical industry and now you don't yeah right so why you start by saying what you do now and then sort of share a bit of that story what happened and how did you end up here today yeah so well i basically write books on that really broadly cover the different ways that your mind and emotions and your behavior has physical effects your health giving effects on the body so i've written a series of books on it i give a lot of talks on it and it really my interest in that in fact if i wind back even further my interest in the pharmaceutical industry was the placebo effect but the interest in that actually was born when I was when I was about 11 years old my mum had postnatal depression and she was suffering terribly and it and it wasn't really understood this was in the mid-70s after my youngest sister was born of three sisters my youngest sister was born in 1976 postnatal depression was not well understood at the time and my mum didn't really get the right treatment in fact the the the psychiatrist she was sent to to see said give yourself a shake but asking a woman with postnatal depression to give herself a shake is like asking someone with a broken leg to run it off I suppose and my mum really it really shattered her self-esteem and she thought she would feel really low about herself and like she's just not a strong person and and so she suffered terribly for a few years and as a young child I could tell my mum was struggling and I didn't really know what was wrong and I remember one day I'd only just started secondary school and this might sound really corny right I don't know if I bumped my bag off the off the shelf but a book fell off the shelf and it was called the magic power of your mind and I'm just 11 years old magic power of your mind Walter Germain and I thought I've got I bet that can help my mum so I just took it I put it in my bag and I didn't know you're supposed to join a library, you know, get the little yellow card stamp.

6:33But it totally helped my mum. It didn't, you know, cure depression in a day, but it gave her tools and strategies like what we now call mindfulness. It gave her those kind of things that helped her navigate a course through the difficult times. So as I grew up in my teenage years, my mum would often use affirmations and she would do meditation and she would say things like, I can do it. It's all in the mind, mind over matter. So having these conversations with my mum, it's no surprise that my interest became the power of the mind and what your mind can do and the effect your mind has on your body.

7:05So when I ended up working in the pharmaceutical industry, developing drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer, most of my colleagues would be celebrating when you hear that one of the drugs that we've participated in is working. But I was so fascinated with how many people were improving on placebos. and it was so interesting to me and I think because my mum had learned about mental strategies that could help her a little bit and navigate that course through some of those difficult days so that was my so I was so fascinated after four years of really my own mini research projects just reading and learning everything I could I decided to resign because I my passion then was to educate people on to write and to speak to educate on how we can harness this overall effect you know to to improve our health and to you know make life a little bit better for us yeah i mean thanks for sharing that it is a fascinating story when your mum was unwell and you brought home that book about the power of the mind you know how old were you and what were you interested in at school at that time i was 11 years old my mate i just started secondary school so but my main my my passion i guess at school if you could call it a passion when you're 11 was mathematics and so when i went to high school it was maths and science was my big things i i really i i used the word i hated english and it's funny you know if someone had said to me as a child you will write lots of books one day i'd have laughed at them you know me writing books because it was just maths and science is all i was interested in well that's that's interesting because you picked up that book for your mum at the age of 11 now look my kids aren't yet 11 my my son's nine and i'm sort of gonna guess that 11 is still at that age where still naive enough to kind of believe in stuff and um have faith let's say and i'm just wondering you know as you got through your education and studied science more and more to a higher and higher degree, did you ever start to get sceptical about the importance of the mind?

9:19Because it's not really something we're taught at school. It's not something we're taught in science. It's not something we're taught at medical school. And a lot of your work now is showing the beautiful science that actually exists around kindness, around the placebo, around the power of the mind. So I'm super fascinating. Did you go through this period of scepticism somewhere and then come out the other side or what happened surprisingly not so much what i would say is i just forgot about it yeah you know you get so i mean i i got so engrossed in my my degree you know i did chemistry then my phd was organic chemistry and you get so engrossed in it that i actually just forgot really i remember reading a norman vincent peele the power of positive thinking when I was halfway through my PhD and it almost reminded me of the passion I had.

10:11I remember, you know, I was literally in the middle of my second year of my PhD and all of a sudden ignited, reading this book ignited my passion. It was the memory I had of, I'm so interested in, you know, at the time the book was just about positive thinking, but it wasn't just about positive thinking. I looked at that as not just about positive thinking, that I'll say positive things and positive things happen it was more about the attitude that you were bringing to situations to change how you felt about something and that's the message I got and I thought this this is what I love and and so during my PhD I started to really dream daydream I suppose that one day I would write a book about the mind and I had no idea what I would write about me right I mean even at the time the idea of writing but it just seemed like something I knew I had to do one day so you're working for a pharmaceutical company you're there with your team with your colleagues trying to develop drugs that have been designed to help people you know you said something about the placebo effect which i find super interesting so um you know for people who are not familiar um the way we often analyze drugs is we do something called a randomized control trial so you know very very crudely speaking you take two groups of people um you know let's say there's 200 people there and you're testing a drug for blood pressure and 100 people get the drug for blood pressure 100 people don't they get just a sugar pill is that right and then you see who has um you know has there been a statistically significant uh increase or benefit in one of the groups i.e the group who's taking the drug ideally i guess if that's what you're studying and it's done because often placebo has been certainly my interpretation of this as a medic is that oh if it's just the same as placebo then the drug doesn't work is the very simplistic explanation and if it's beyond that to a certain degree we're like okay this drug actually works it's beyond the kind of placebo thing right and in almost a derogatory way but nonetheless if you about it even if in that hundreds let's say that group who don't get the drug 100 people who've got blood pressure or high blood pressure if 10 of them get better on taking the placebo and 20 get better on taking the pharmaceutical drug well the placebo is still doing something right yeah and is that what is that what happened with you you thought hold on a minute well how can we explain that pretty much and and seen it because because i was a chemist so close to building the drug i mean literally organic chemists like me it's like adults who play with lego blocks but instead of using taking lego blocks of different shapes and sizes and assembling them into shapes we take building blocks of different shapes and sizes called atoms but the principle is the same sticking them together so i was so close to the actual the chemistry of it and i just found it so fascinating that large numbers of people were improving on the placebos.

13:19And I remember asking my colleagues, and they would just dismiss it, oh, it's just a placebo effect. Just the placebo. And it was a sweeping movement of the right hand, even left hand. I think you learn it on your first day, it's just a placebo effect. And I came to realise that nobody actually understood it at all. They had no idea how it really worked. So that's why, out of curiosity, I wanted to understand what happens. And now we actually understand that for a number of different conditions when a person believes they're receiving a drug the brain produces its own natural substances to deliver what they expect so for example if someone takes a a painkiller a placebo but they think it's a painkiller then and it works depending it can work really really well depending on the language or empathy used by the person who suggested they take it but what the reason why it works isn't just as my colleague said it's it's not really they're not getting better, they just think they're getting better.

14:14But in actual fact, believing that this is a drug caused their brain to produce natural versions of morphine. So morphine is an opiate. We have our natural versions and they're called endogenous opiates, meaning they're endogenous to you, they belong to you. So the brain produces endogenous opiates because you believe something. So the reduction in pain, for example, isn't just all in the mind, it's a real physical change caused by real chemical changes in the brain produced by what you expect is supposed to happen when you take this little pill and it was that type of thing realizing there's a scientific basis for belief and it was building the evidence and yeah i spent hours in the library in the in the company just researching gathering all the papers i could find and it was just so interesting and i thought no one really knows about this professionals lay people don't really understand did we almost not want to know about it because it didn't fit our societal narrative that we're trying to find new and better technologies, whether it's a drug, whether it's another treatment, that's going to help.

15:17But it can't just be the power of positive thinking, right? I mean, I guess you find what you're looking for, right? So if people aren't looking for that, it's easy to, you know, diminish it and just think, it doesn't matter and i i've got to say you know i think still as a medical profession i don't think we take the placebo seriously enough and i mean what do you think you know do you think things have changed in the last 10 20 years it's definitely changing i think when i i left the pharmaceutical industry you know back in 1999 so just over 20 years ago and it's definitely changing people are far more aware of it or of the way in which even the way you talk to someone how that can make them feel.

16:01In fact, there was a study on doctor visits over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu. And they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between zero and 10 on the empathy that they showed for during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10 their immune response to the same condition was 50 higher than everyone else and it just came down to empathy yeah how it made them feel and what you're seeing is how how you feel then is physically affecting you the function of the immune system i think that's the key isn't it that it's it's not just in your head it's changing things biologically physiologically absolutely david when i hear that it reminds me of something that I often say, I've said it to the public before I've said it, when I teach doctors, that the number one skill for any healthcare professional for me is their ability to connect.

17:08Absolutely. And then secondly to that, communicate with the person in front of them. For me, that trumps knowledge any day of the week. And I've just seen that time and time again. And that sort of fits in with what you're saying, right? That if - It's empathy. It's empathy. If you feel, as a human being, if you feel heard, if you feel listened. Absolutely. It does something, you know. A, you're more receptive to hearing what comes next. So I would say it's connection first, education second. Yeah. Because when you've connected with them and they feel heard by you, they're open to listening to what you have to say.

17:44Absolutely. Whereas if you just go charging in and say, look, you need to lose weight, get to the gym a bit more. You know what? you know this is why a lot of people say oh patients don't do what we ask them to do well i think the reason they don't ask they don't do what we ask them to do as a profession is because a lot of the time we're not communicating it in a way that makes sense to them and and actually deeply connects with them i know and it's that deep connection has tremendous physical effects in fact one of the one of the side effects i suppose of feel that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the mother theresa effect i think it was a study, I think it was at Yale or one of the other big American universities, they got over 100 people to watch a video of, a 50-minute video of Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta, demonstrating care and compassion to homeless people.

18:37And at the end of the study, their levels of a little immune antibody in the saliva called SIGA went up by about 50 % for no reason other than just watching the video. And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards. And that's because for the hour or two afterwards that we're still talking about, remember that part when Mother Teresa, she sat down beside that really elderly gent and they didn't say a word. She just sat beside him. She took his hand and laid her head against his shoulder just so that he wouldn't feel alone at that time. And just that emotional bonding experience of watching them on that video spiked the immune system.

19:19It just lifted that little antibody level. So it's not just the person who received that, it's also if you're watching that. Absolutely. It's watching it as well, because it comes down to how it makes you feel. If you can feel a sense of connection from being the person who, in this case, is delivering kindness or compassion, being on the receiving end or watching someone else, whether it's live or even on a video, it has more or less the same effect. And I guess, you know, that could be why, you know, if you watch a really good film that really moves you and connects you and you feel like crying or you feel like you've really connected with it.

19:54I don't know, that's been studied, but I wouldn't be... It has actually. Has it? There was a clip of Oprah Winfrey during the time of the Oprah show and she was, I forget the exact nature of the clip, but she was really changing people's lives and it was something to do with a school teacher and a class and what people watching it were moved to tears and felt so uplifted and it produced high levels of what i call the kindness hormone oxytocin it's also called the bonding hormone the hugging the cuddle chemical but it produced high levels of that simply by feeling and moved and inspired by watching a like a five minute clip from from what used to be the opera winter show yeah i mean it's really incredible and this is right up my street honestly this is um this is becoming clearer and clearer to me as every year passes since i qualified for medical school and i and i gain more experience and more experience to see more patients this for me is the missing link in healthcare um that not everything can be quantified with just blood results and test results and just do this do that there's just something deeper um and that that is something that for me is what it means to be a human being because whether we're a patient or you know we're not a patient we're all humans and there are some fundamental truths for humans we're social beings we like to be connected with others what you said about sequitory or siga is so interesting to me um i've also studied immunology and for people wondering what siga is um we all know about the immune system which helps you know fight off infections and viruses and bacteria and all kinds of things and a lot of your immune system maybe 70 percent or so the immune system activity is in and around your gut which is super interesting and that's called your mucosal immune system and the primary the main sort of defense molecule of that is srga secretory rga so to think that that can go up with this kind of compassion compassion being practiced yeah it's incredible there are studies aren't there about recovering quicker from colds i think and the flu when what was something to do with compassion yeah i i think that there's some research looking at the more compassion that let's say a doctor feels for it's part of this relational empathy study that the people who had scored the doctor the highest in other words the interpretation of that is they felt listened to and they felt connected and more you know warm and connected with with the doctor their recovery rate was about 50 faster than everyone else it really just came down to how much empathy how much of a connection was initiated by the doctor man that's incredible isn't that amazing they recovered 50 faster compared to people who when when there was no or there wasn't enough contact and connection and during the consultation yeah i find i find the idea that it's not just the giver but the receiver or the watcher also gets a biochemical change and um i i don't know if you're familiar with someone called professor francis mcglone uh i interviewed him on the podcast about a year ago uh he helped me actually write uh the chapter on touch in my second one the stress solution he's it's one of the world's leading researchers in touch basically and he's done some incredible you should check it out actually because it's completely aligned with a lot of the work that you do um and he talks about you know these two different kinds of touch nerve fibers you've got one which is the fast one which simply tells you where you've been touched you know you know if i touch you on your forearm you know oh wrong has just touched me on my forearm but if you stroke someone on the forearm it does something completely different absolutely and well i mean his his work has shown that it's a different kind of nerve fiber it's called the the ct afferent that goes to a different part of the brain, the emotional brain.

23:53And when you get that stroke, oxytocin levels go up, blood pressure goes down, heart rate goes down, natural killer cells, which are part of your immune system, go up, I think, 50 to 70%. So we're seeing a similarity, but also that most of those C-tactile afferent nerve fibers, so that slower nerve fiber that gives you that nice, warm, cuddly feeling, most of them are on your upper back and your shoulder is that right yeah so what's fascinating about that is is that why would evolution put something like that on a very hard to access place well his view and my view is that well it must have been there to promote that sort of social connection so you would have to be with someone to stroke you there yeah and so the touch giver you know gets just as many benefits as the touch receiver people who've got a pet you know stroking your pet makes you feel good but it also makes your pet feel good but this is not just in your head oh it feels good right as you're showing and as francis mcglone has shown it changes things biochemically and for me it's fascinating it's the same hormone oxytocin so you know i mean what do you make of that?

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27:40See, actually, you mentioned the animal thing. I love animals. I lost my dog a few years ago. He had bone cancer. He was only two years old as well. And so I'd started looking at the links between bonding with animals and oxytocin. And one of my favourite statistics that I got out of that research is the chances of a second heart attack within 12 months in someone who's had one already, if they have a dog, it's 400 % less. And it's not just through the exercise, it's through a lot of it. Some of it is through the oxytocin generated through the bonding. Front page of science, you know, one of the top ranked science journals in the world.

28:17Front page, about 10 years ago, picture of a yellow Labrador. And in the study, they compared people with a good relationship with dogs versus people with a not so good relationship. The way they quantified it is they videoed them and they watched them interacting with the dogs. And if someone made frequent eye contact and sustained the eye contact for a few seconds, they were called long gazers. So they were defined as good relationships. If they made eye contact less frequently and not quite as long, then they were called short gazers so not as good relationships so after 30 minutes of interacting amazingly oxytocin levels had increased by about 350 percent in the human and nearly doubled in the dog for doing nothing other than warm playful interactions rubbing the tummy just warm interaction you get the same thing with humans but the reason i mentioned it is because you mentioned dogs there and I love animals and amazingly and that I believe is one of the main reasons the main contributors outside of exercise to the cardiovascular benefits because oxytocin has tremendous cardiovascular benefits well let's expand on that because that is a novel concept for people that the sort of things you're talking about human touch connection uh stroking you know all these kind of i guess what we would call the softer components of health you're saying alongside physical exercise physical activity is the most important thing for your cardiovascular health i don't think many people would be familiar with that as an idea yeah just just warmth and connection because they produce oxytocin so you can you can create that sense through generosity and kindness compassion empathy all of anything that generates that sense of warmth and connection we know produces oxytocin but what's interesting is all the research showing the physiological effects of I call it the kindness hormone really to distinguish between stress hormones because physiologically in many ways kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel I mean if you ask anyone what's the opposite of stress most people say oh it's peace or it's calm but that's not technically the opposite of stress that's the absence of stress physiologically speaking if you look at the physical effects of stress and you look at the physical effects of the feeling that you get through kindness which is warmth and connection then they're physiologically opposite even psychologically there's some studies showing that you know emotionally we get the opposite effects because because many of this the physical effects of stress are not because of a situation but because of how you feel when you're in that situation because two people could be stuck in traffic and one person's feeling stressed and they're producing adrenaline and cortisol the other person's feeling relaxed they're not producing much at all so it's not necessarily the traffic it's how you feel so if the feelings of stress generate stress hormones but when you be kind and those feelings you get of warmth and connection they generate oxytocin I call this them I call it a kindness hormone to make that distinction that it's a physical it's a hormone that gets produced because of how you're feeling in that moment which you initiate through empathy compassion touch emotional warmth any any any of soft behaviours and understanding this explains a large body of research that we knew the trend in the past but we didn't know why it worked that way for example why people with better quality relationships have better cardiovascular systems why things like hostility and aggression is correlated with higher levels of hardening of the arteries we didn't know why that is but now the evidence seems to digest that you know aggression and hostility for example reduce levels of the the kindness hormone, oxytocin.

32:01And therefore we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin is now called a cardioprotective hormone, meaning it protects the cardiovascular system. One of the ways it does it is to reduce blood pressure. So I love explaining it in that sense that it's physically the opposite of stress because of how it makes you feel. So you can feel that way through being the giver, being the receiver, or being the person who's watching a nice moment taking place. David, my mind is blown. This is so fascinating. So fascinating. And I'm drawing all kinds of connections in my head over things I've been talking about for years, things I've noticed with patients.

32:43And this is filling in a few more gaps and it's all starting to knit together. You may have seen the study, I think it was published three or four years ago, which suggested that the feeling of being lonely is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. incredible it's incredible but then when you try and make the case that uh oxytocin might be the cardioprotective hormone then suddenly it's all starting to to make sense but i guess we have to we have to look at things on an evolutionary or through an evolutionary lens really yeah to try and figure this out right like i said you know why would evolution put these tutriceps on our back well to promote social contact you would think it's nature rewarding you saying yes more of this please i will make you healthy keep doing that yeah yeah in fact you know the the the gene for oxytocin uh the the oxytocin receptor gene actually it's one of the oldest in the human genome it's about 500 million years old and four days no i'm not four days yeah it's 500 about 500 crap joke apologies to the listeners i couldn't resist it but 500 million years old what that tells you is it's vital for the survival of all species.

33:56I mean, all warm-blooded species have an oxytocin or a oxytocin similar system. In humans, it's integrated itself during those hundreds of millions of years into almost all important meaningful systems in the body, even the growth of heart muscle cells in children. If children are loved and cared for, then as well as that producing human growth hormone, it also produces oxytocin, which helps to facilitate the growth of heart muscle cells, neurons, kidney cells, liver cells, skin cells. And that's why children who are deprived of love and affection, they end up, I guess psychologists think they call it psychosocial dwarfism, they end up a lot smaller than their genetic potential, because levels of growth hormone and oxytocin are suppressed through the lack of love and compassion and care.

34:41Absolutely. And then there's the study with the Romanian orphanages, where kids were fed and watered, but they didn't get touch. And the ones who didn't get any touch have got higher instances that are older, autoimmune problems, behavioural problems. And it all marries up that we're a social species. We are, you know, we've evolved to be connected to each other, but now we're frankly more connected to our devices than we are to other humans. So if you show your smartphone compassion and you touch your smartphone, does it also release oxytocin? Well, you know, you've made me think there. I was joking, but unless you're going to pull out a research study.

35:22No, I wasn't. I was going to pull out the film Cast Away with Tom Hanks. Okay. And I, you know, remember, was it Wilson he called that, was it a coconut or a football he called it Wilson? I have not seen it actually. All right, well, years ago, Cast Away. But Gareth is videoing this in the background, he's nodding his head seriously. So Tom Hanks, Cast Away, was on a desert island for years and he made a connection. I'm sure it was an old burst football or a coconut or something, but he made it into something that he bonded with and he spoke to it as if it was a person. He gave it a face and hair and he called it Wilson and he cared so much for it that one day when it got swept to sea, he was devastated.

35:58It was grief. It was loss. And I think if you can bond even with, you know, make a joke about hugging a tree, it doesn't matter. if you can bond with even in that case an inanimate object doesn't matter it it's as long as you feel i'm making light obviously you're not going to bond with a smartphone but in general if you can like a child bonding with a doll for example with a with a you know a teddy bear something that you feel you can bond with it's that bonding itself that releases the oxygen so we're wired to bond and to connect yeah i love that and you know the idea of a child with their teddy uh or even this film inanimate objects um and again yeah i started out as a slight joke actually if you think about it well technically you probably could bond with your smartphone if you gave it that kind of deep love care and and affection but i guess we're not doing that are we the idea of even saying that most people laugh at that because we all use our smartphones but let's say you were to paint a wee smiley face on it and and maybe something happened to you that you know that the only thing you had was a smartphone and you just made a connection maybe that that was your way of communicating with the world and you were all alone all of a sudden you would have a connection with the smartphone that's different from just sitting on the tube and taking looking at your emails so i guess in some ways well in many ways yes we're talking about connection but we're talking also about intentional living and we're talking about being present and being mindful because that's really what that connection is isn't it if you're sort of um building up that relationship with another person or another object or a teddy you're intentionally doing it maybe speaking to it before you go to bed you're and And as you said before, it's about the feeling that changes inside you that actually leads to a lot of those biochemical changes.

38:02Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, I often suggest to people that make kindness a practice, practice thinking kind thoughts about people. You know, if you find yourself about to say something about someone, stop for a minute and even just make an attempt. you know not going to do all the time but some of the times make an attempt to think I wonder if that person's struggling in their life right now I know I'm talking about their behavior yesterday but I wonder if they're struggling right now you never know I wonder if that that man or woman is a good parent I wonder what their relationship was with their parents and just change the dialogue and what that does it introduces empathy and introduces is a different way of thinking and not always successful but oftentimes it'll make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person I think if we develop little practices then kindness becomes a habit so that it's the go-to it's the first thought is the compassionate thought the kind thought and then the way in which you speak to people the way in which you interact with people becomes more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit and that I think becomes your way and i'm speaking from experience here because i i have completely changed as a person in the and during the time that i've been really working on the mind-body connection but particularly when i've been focused on kindness i mean i wasn't not and i wasn't i wasn't meaning as a horrible person but relative i have made large gains i guess in the i guess the quality of person that I've become and I've become gentler more compassionate more kind I cry a lot more I don't know if that's related to it but I'm much softer than I was maybe 10 years ago and it's a consequence of my awareness of what kindness and compassion is and what it does for us yeah you can cultivate this as a feeling as a practice um and I think for many of us we we sort of feel that I'm just not a kind person or you know that's not me and it almost feels a little bit forced but I think you can force it a little bit and actually make it and and turn it into your reality and it's something um you know it's something that I talk about on my kids loads is this idea of being kind and um we we play this gratitude game every dinner time that I've I've mentioned on this podcast before so I don't need to mention the the exact nature of that game again um but sometimes we do add on a question um to say well what have i done today what what kind thing have i done today and we go around we have to think about it and we we once did that for about three weeks every day wow and and you know i think initially it was a bit tricky it's oh i'm not sure i'm not sure you know there was a bit of resistance to it but after a while it's really started to embed in and i think the kids were super excited to tell mummy and daddy at dinner time what kind thing they did today and so it almost i guess in some ways it's sort of playing back to what you're saying at the start which we're going to explore is the power of our minds on our bodies like you can almost practice the kind of person you want to become and you can become it absolutely i mean it's like no one's ever become an olympic champion by going to the gym once or running around the block once it because it's a practice so anything that you do to to get better at is something that you practice so i think when you practice being kind that's a that's amazing game that you play with the kids have you actually out of interest have you noticed that as they you do that you play that game that they've become more likely to be kind because they're looking for something to talk about 100 yeah it's amazing it's very hard you know it's not a scientific study where i can peel out every little component in it but something has changed yeah and um you know again for me you know i'd like to think i was a kind and compassionate person anyway but i think being aware of this and actually positively trying to cultivate that on my children is also upskilling me in that area as well um and i noticed that a lot in my interactions now on social media um and that you know even when someone which is very rare these days but if someone's left a snarty comment or said something to attack me um you know it doesn't really bother me anymore and i look at it with kindness and compassion i think oh i wonder what's going on in your day you've probably taken that out on me that's you know in my head and i really it's you know there's a scientific argument to it but even if there wasn't it just feels like the right thing to do and it feels nicer and you sleep better and you don't get agitated as much exactly um i think that whole idea that that the kindness is the opposite of stress is it's a really beautiful concept um what happens when we get angry like i know from a stress perspective in terms of the stress hormones and i have seen um anger that we hold on to for years and resentment it is toxic it can absolutely raise your blood pressure and i've got a few patients of mine who i couldn't get that blood pressure down with medication with uh diets with lifestyle changes in a way that i would always you know i would always go for nutrition and lifestyle first until they start to let go of anger that they were holding on to um is that something you're familiar with yeah i mean i i think it's better to get it out than in i mean sometimes people say you shouldn't be angry but you need to get it out there's got to be some way of venting you know i'm not advocating you know you know being unkind to people what i what i mean is if you if you've got pent up and stored up anger it's better out than in fact i read a book recently called expressive writing by a professor called james penny baker and he pioneered a lot of the work on releasing anger and trauma in the body by simply spending 15 or 20 minutes a day writing continuously for that time on four consecutive days about your emotional trauma or something that happened and you basically outline what happened how you felt how it's affected your life kind of thing just some way just want that's basic structure to vent and sometimes you can swear and you could anger but but the idea the act of expressing it gradually has an amazing effect because in one of the studies they they found that their immune response to an endotoxin was significantly higher than those who hadn't done the expressive writing so the immune system is becoming more robust as a consequence of expressive writing that's incredible and for people listening who are not familiar with what an endotoxin is um you know one way of describing it is that inside your gut um we've got lots of different bacteria you know trillions of bacteria and other organisms.

45:01And we very simplistically consider them to be good and bad, which is far too simplistic. But essentially, some of those bacteria are called what we call gram-negative. And on their coats, you've got something called lipopolysaccharide or LPS. It's a little sugar that basically is fine if it stays in your gut. But if it sort of goes through from the gut into your bloodstream, that's where it can be pro-inflammatory. And that's cause all kinds of problems in your brain and your joints with your blood sugar. So that's what an endotoxin is. And, you know, what you're saying there about how it can alter your immune response is pretty incredible.

45:42Simply just by doing expressive writing. They found a lot of other studies. They even tracked students over the course of a year. And they tracked, they had enough students to get a statistically significant result and tracked the number of visits to the medical centre. and they found that those who did the expressive writing had significantly lower need to visit the medical center, having just got anger and hurt and trauma out of their system. You've got to process it in some way. And actually this whole British characteristic of stiff upper lip, you know, keep it inside, I think it is incredibly problematic because that anger, that energy really has to go somewhere.

46:23And we're seeing loads of good evidence down there it gets stored in your body and it can impact muscle tightness and all kinds of things that people are trying to stretch out but actually often it's um unprocessed emotions that i've seen in my own life i've seen my own flexibility in improve dramatically not by stretching every day but by releasing some emotions that i'd held on to which is simply incredible and all and you know because if we don't then you it's possible to start fitting the cardiovascular status i mean One of the, I guess one of my favorite titles of a study is called Marital Conflict Relations and Coronary Artery Calcification, or CAC for short.

47:05And I think you can work, most people can work it with that means, Marital Conflict Relations and Coronary Artery Calcification. Scientists took 150 married couples, put them in a room one couple at a time, asked them to discuss marital topics for half an hour. and they videotaped them and they scored displays, you know, language and displays of kindness and compassion and gentleness and patience. And they also scored anger and hostility and aggression and all these kind of things like that. So you've got a whole spectrum from the real far out hostile, aggressive and frequent expressions of anger to the other side, which is really people you say were softer people, gentler much more compassion and kindness and empathy and touch also and one of the most amazing symmetries i've ever come across in science when i say a symmetry you know it's symmetrical one thing on the other the group who had high levels of hostility aggression and anger expressing which you might say are hardened people they had high levels of hardening of the arteries and the other group who were softer people they'd normal what you would call soft arteries when you when you controlled in the study for diet and exercise smoking drinking etc the only difference really was how you behaved in that half an hour and that was taken as a proxy for normal behavior that half an hour slice was taken as a proxy for this is probably how you are a large part of the time and so what you can see there is if we don't get out our system it can end up having serious negative consequences yeah and i think we all need to find ways to process those feelings that that wind us up anger frustration too much stress you know exercise can be a great way of burning it off and letting it go even i say to people you know you don't have time you know do one minute of star jumps as hard as you can you know you literally are burning off and absolutely and that stress to a certain degree another tip that um a friend of mine gave me he uses it himself and i've tried it a couple of times it's like if someone makes you mad or you get frustrated with something um write an email back to them but don't press and yeah and i can't tell you it is it is incredibly beneficial because as as you've already demonstrated with some of the research you've you've cited there's something about the act of not just keeping it going around your mind going around your body you you are processing it in some way you you're writing it out you're talking it out you and that is processing yeah you know and it's we shouldn't underestimate how you know how valuable simple tools like this really are i know because you know one of the things I've noticed is we think of a feeling or emotion as just something in our minds but there's actually four components to it you can't really disentangle an emotion or a feeling from your brain chemistry and body chemistry you also can't disentangle it from your autonomic nervous system nor can you disentangle a feeling from your muscles I mean you don't smile when you're happy because you remember to smile it's a reflex reaction because the zygomaticus major muscle that pulls your lips into a smile is connected in some way to the, say, call them the happy centers of the brain.

50:22Similarly, when you feel stressed, you don't remember to tense your jaw and tense your neck. It's a reflex reaction. So what happens is how we feel gets expressed on the muscles, but it goes the other way as well. You know, what you do with your body. One of the best ways I've ever found to reduce feeling momentary feelings of stress is to move my body get up rather than sitting down and breathing softly i'll get up and move but an artificially slow pace and using this fact that emotion isn't just a feeling it's connected to your it's part of your how it shows up in your muscles if you move your body in an artificially slow way and even talk artificially slowly obviously if you're at a meeting you're not going to do that but in your on your own it's almost like your brain hears i've got this i must feel quite relaxed yeah and i think that works because you know long before language language is what 15 000 years old give or take a wee bit but long before language our ancestors communicated through body language and gesture if they they want to express themselves they use their body to to express so so what happened is that became this really strong relationship between physical expression and how the person feels so it's really so so in that way what you find is how you feel shows up in your muscles but how you move your muscles and your body shows up in how you feel and it's a two-way street so you can use your body like exercise movement for example to to help change how you feel in the moment kind of thing you know i've spoken to a lot of um therapists recently who you know work on people's bodies whether it's a sports massage therapist um or whatever kind of therapist but they will tell you that you can feel or they can feel particularly when they've been doing it for a period of years so i can tell what's going on in that person's life i can feel how stress they are from the tone of their muscles and how their body feels now look that's not my skill set so i can't but it's really interesting to hear that um yeah and i guess david you know as you're telling me you know the these stories and this research you know i keep thinking back to you as you say 20 years ago in the pharmaceutical industry

52:37and you know these things that we're talking about we often say are the softer characteristics of being a human the softer sides to medicine or whatever you know we in some ways we're being a little bit derogatory about them like almost as if we feel a need to soften it like quite literally whereas you know it's not quite as um you know as as robust as you know what's the oxygen level of the blood as it pumps out of the heart you know or is it because is it just a perception because you're a scientist by training you're a scientist by degree you've got a PhD in organic chemistry you know this is pretty hardcore yet you are now talking with confidence with knowledge about the science of kindness of compassion of touch of visualization you know what do your former colleagues think of what you're doing now do they know?

53:36Are you still in touch with them?

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