The Hardest Thing I’ve Learned About Self-Talk — and How to Stop Beating Yourself Up

0:00Happy New Year everyone. Welcome to my first ever solo episode on Live Well Be Well. It's only taken me three years to get here but we are starting 2026 with an ambition that I had in mind to bring you regular solo episodes with me, the host Sarah Ann. And it's interesting because I was thinking so much about where I start this episode. If you've just heard our New Year's Eve takeaways and our reflections of the most listened to episodes, you'd realise how much goodness is in these podcasts. Now, before I even start, everything about Live Well, Be Well to me was to bring a collection of really interesting minds from scientists, professors, people in research, and also thought leaders to you to help you navigate the very complex world that health seems to have turned into these days.

0:51I really do believe that health doesn't need to be this complex, but so much about what makes it complex is the overwhelming amount of information, but also the disconnection from what we believe that we really need. I hope that these solo episodes are going to help basically bring in different nuggets that I've learned through my own journey, through writing the newsletters on the Compassionate Cure on my sub stack that drop every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up, please do. And also through every single conversations that I have on this podcast, Live Well, Be Well, I thought I'd collate them all when every month bring you a digestible nugget on different areas that have, yeah, hit me.

1:33So this one's a bit of a hard one because this is basically three and a half years of thoughts going into 30 minutes to one hour episode. But I wanted to start here, vulnerability. Now I have had recently, just before the end of 2025, one of my all-time favourite guests and superheroes come on the podcast and we started the conversation off with vulnerability. Now this episode hasn't dropped yet, so this is a little insight into what is coming with the man behind the school of life, Alain de Botton. And one of my favourite quotes from Alain is, most of what matters in our lives takes place in our minds, in those private spaces where we face discomfort and negotiate who we become.

2:13I went into this conversation that you will be hearing very, very soon. Wanting to explore vulnerability. Now, as we start this new year, we're all probably setting intentions, setting goals, writing values, all of these things. But so much about our actual growth in all of these areas comes from being vulnerable with ourselves, being vulnerable with our strengths and with our weaknesses. The discomfort can feel very hard when we can shine our weaknesses on us. But something that I've learned through Live Well, Be Well, is the vulnerability conversation is really important. I feel honoured that so many people come to the show and are very vulnerable, not just to me, but also with you, they're opening up some of their innermost thoughts on this show.

2:54And that's really powerful. And what it's done for me is allow me to do the same. You might be thinking, why have I only just started doing these solo episodes. And the truth is, it's actually taking me a lot of vulnerability to get here, to be able to sit here in front of a camera and expose some of my learnings and thoughts to you guys. That's something that I wanted to lean into as the start of 2026. I thought, what better place to start than vulnerability? He said something to me really fascinating on giving you some of the nuggets before the episode drops. And he said, take a per faith. Assume that everyone has a hidden crazy as much as you do.

3:32And I loved that because underneath it all, we are all slightly crazy. We're all slightly a little bit mad or we think we are. And yet we then try to perform our best selves to other people. It's quite a nice reminder to have in your mind that everyone is a little bit crazy, including ourselves. And that is what makes us perfect. But that also makes us bloody interesting. Whenever you have these moments of self-doubt, remember that, that you're crazy is what gives you that special spark. And it's what makes you different. And that's what makes you awesome. And the reason why I think this is so important to start is because when we are more vulnerable, even with ourselves, not necessarily to others, it does unlock something.

4:12It is the courage to take that step in the right direction of conquering something that you might have been holding back. Maybe there's feelings of not good enough or self-criticism or completely normal natural behaviours. But what happens is if we don't do that, we can lock our bodies down and become quite disconnected. And that's been like a really interesting theme that's run through this podcast, especially in 2025. And I had a very interesting guest, Professor Dan Nicolou, who is the head of psychoneuroimmunology at King's College. A lot of words there. But basically what he does is he looks at the brain and the immune system.

4:49Now we've all heard of the gut and the brain and the connections and maybe when we feel anxious our tummies go a little bit or when we feel like we have a upset tummy or maybe a locked stomach we can feel more anxious and we can ruminate more with our thoughts. What I found really interesting about Dan is that he actually looks at the brain and the immune system. Whole new area that unlocks something for me and when I first met him he said to me what do you think comes first? The brain or the immune system. So I'm going to ask you, what do you think comes first, the brain or the immune system?

5:23And I actually said the brain and he told me I was wrong. And he said before animals had anything resembling a brain or a nervous system, they already had cells that could sense danger, respond to threats and remember past attacks. That is the immune system. He said a brain is essentially a very advanced danger detection and information processing upgrade that came much later. Basically, what he was trying to tell me in that is how interlinked everything is. And so much about health sometimes is that we can really put things in long verticals and we can forget complexities and how everything is so integrated.

6:00And I find this so important because you'll probably start your new year thinking, I want to, you know, boost my immunity, which we shouldn't be doing because that will make us sick. But you basically want to bolster your immune system so you're not getting sick and you're feeling strong and you're starting your year off in a robust way like none of us like being ill but rather than just thinking about taking the vitamins like vitamin d and omega-3 and zinc and all of the things that we normally think about our immune system and we need to start thinking about this year that your thoughts are chemicals and those chemicals instruct your immune system on what to do as someone who has spent a long time studying the mind-body connection.

6:40I am constantly asked what do I use to track my health. Since April, you've probably seen if you're watching this show me wearing a piece of tech on my arm and that is No Watch because I genuinely believe it has been one of the most thoughtful and mind-aware pieces of tech that you can wear. Unlike most wearables that focus just on your steps or your sleep, No Watch is a bit different and gives you real-time insights into your nervous system, the invisible engine that calibrates everything from your stress to your sleep to your recovery your rest and ultimately your health. With its stress recovery metric it doesn't just show you how long you were stressed for but also how long you recovered it shows you your homeostatus and that to me is where real health begins and I think it's all something that we're craving and most importantly it does this without dragging you back to your phone because that motion just depletes you.

7:30It delivers meaningful health insights to you only when something genuinely matters. Using AI to turn complex signals into clarity that you can understand. And in just five days, it calibrates to your body and creates your personalised health fingerprint. You can try it for 30 days completely free. And if you're curious, now's the time because they're giving you guys 15 % off with my code LWBW15 if you head to knowwatch.com and you guys know as listeners of Live Bobbie Well and this whole community that understanding yourself in the most mindful way is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your health and this little gadget helps you on your journey.

8:14So just related to what I was just saying all of these kind of thoughts that you might be having to start your new year are also not only going to be impacting your personal growth but they're also going to be impacting your immune system. Something that we all do when we start the new year I'm sure is set intentions. It's more of a reflective period you've had time away from our work potentially you've been with your family and you're kind of thinking like what do I want to achieve this year. One thing that I would say that I'm going to try and do this year is to recalibrate those harsh thoughts in my mind because Dan said something to me in this episode and you can go back and look at it that he said once you experience a substantial shock such as burnout the immune system is essentially permanently on alert so if you can try and set an intention this year to somehow regulate stress and I mean extreme stress we're all going to have stress.

9:09That's really important just for your general health and your immune system. I was so shocked to hear that your immune system never fully recovers once it's had a big shock like burnout. I've had burnout before and it made me think, you know, is my immune system just constantly on edge? There's something to really think about that I was reflecting on and something else that's really come up this year is the conversation on social media and my gosh, it's the landscape here constantly changing and I will admit I don't have the best relationship to social media. It's my work. I also love engaging with all of you.

9:40But what he showed in his research on this episode really shocked me. And he showed me that one of his most recent studies that he did shows that negative social media use causes inflammation in the body. And inflammation is like the first tier to chronic disease. All chronic disease is built from inflammation. And so what we're always trying to do when we're looking at health is like reduce that inflammation. Isn't it really interesting how your negative thought patterns could be causing this and social media could be one of the ways that this is happening. How do we get around this? We live in a stimulated world and a really interesting episode to connect to this is Dr.

10:24Tommy Wood who I just spoke to recently about how to making sure we're staying stimulated to increase our cognitive load because that's really important for the reduction of dementia, but also not being so hyper-stimulated that you basically get brain fog and brain rot. This is not all going to be doom and gloom, trust me. So I want to bring in my conversation with TJ Power, who is an amazing neuroscientist, and he looks at the relationships that we all have to dopamine hacks, dopamine crashes, the dopamine loop. Dopamine is that reward hormone that we get when we eat sugary foods, when we get an alert on our phone and it can become hyper addictive.

11:02And we spoke about how we're kind of stuck in this dopamine world. What was really interesting is he labeled ChatGPT the new dopamine addiction. Very interesting, very new interesting thought concept for me. I wanted to understand like how can we develop a healthy relationship so we're not getting the dopamine loops and crashes. Social media also connects us to how comparison is a thief of joy because we're constantly looking at lives that are better of us. And so how can we kind of negotiate a healthy relationship with this? And he was saying something really interesting where he was saying how important boredom is for our brain.

11:36It's really important for those moments of like creativity, just sparks of new ideas that you can't get new ideas unless you feel that you have space. And that's something that I want to take into this year, 2026, is giving my brain space for boredom. So how do I do that? How do you train your brain to connect to boredom? Well, I think the more morning and the evening are going to be two kind of most integral parts of this for you and maybe for me. So no phones for the first hour. And he said something really fascinating that instead of just looking at your phone for WhatsApps, open up your computer and look at iMessage or WhatsApps on there.

12:12It kind of helps break that habit of naturally reaching for your phone, which I find really interesting. So if you do have to look at your phone, try and do it via your laptop and not via your handheld mobile. And because basically I have this natural instinct and I'm sure many of you are the same where it's near my bed and naturally as I turn my alarm off I might look at my messages. So to reduce that don't have your phone in your bedroom and open your messages on your iPad or on your computer. Also natural light we know how important that is for kind of regulating in the morning. And then increasing your movement before you try and have any stimulation whether that's like walking to get a coffee or taking your dog for a walk or just literally going outside and doing some stretches.

12:54And then as well as the screen being banned from the bedroom, there's two other places that I think are really easy to try and ban them from, which is whenever you go to the bathroom, don't take your phone. Now you've heard this, see how often you just naturally pick up your phone to go to the loo. Leave your phone at your desk or wherever you are when you go to the bathroom and when you're having meals I mean I kind of hope we're doing this mostly anyway but don't have your phone on the table just even in reach gives us that it's a stimulus to be there so try and move the phone away from and you can't see it when you're eating I think that's just way more polite with who you're eating with but if you're eating on your own trying to not have it there because as soon as it's there you are going to want to pick it up so that's like a really interesting way that you can try and integrate these things that I'm going going to try and do this year.

13:45Hey guys I am very bad at asking for this but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask a huge favor. If you want to hear more diverse conversations from female voices such as myself I would love if you could hit subscribe. We work so hard on this show to bring you some of the best guests in the world and having a female voice sometimes gives a different perspective and I really want to elevate more of that on this channel. So please hit subscribe if that's important to you as it is to me. One of our biggest clips last year, I mean, one of our biggest episodes was Dr. Stacey Sims, but we only released this episode on fascia two months ago by the time this has come out in the new year.

14:26And I think this will probably be one of our biggest clips that we've ever done. You were so interested in fascia, as was I. And the reason is because we're talking about the mind and body a lot in this episode of takeaways. so much of the time we can intellectualize our thoughts so much sometimes if we don't do the body work and body work what i mean is there's a phrase used called somatic body work which is basically about getting into your body you can basically disconnect the two quite easily what jason did an amazing thing of on the show was talk about the importance of the mind-body connection I have always been so fascinated in Garber Mate and Bessel van der Bekoff's work where he wrote one of the best books in my opinion on which was way ahead of his time on the body keeps the score on how your mind and body you know process trauma differently and trauma can be a whole range of things over the years your body holds on to emotions that you haven't quite let go of and conceptually I always found this like quite hard to get my head around I've come to realize that through these conversations and through engaging in it myself in the last year it's something that is so integral to any part of growth but also a healthy body and a healthy mind which is essentially where we're all trying to get to something that could be really helpful to think about is when you're moving doing movements like rotations and and just even like shaking kids do this quite naturally but we stop as adults because they feel a bit weird and stupid so that's one thing that can be really really powerful is trying to work with movements that move your fascia in your body because your body is a vehicle for your brain you've got to move them together and sometimes there's moments in life where talking therapy isn't enough we've got to get into our body and I realize just how much time I spend at my desk and we don't move we don't allow things to process so that's something that for this year 2026 I want to do so many more episodes on this getting more into the body as well as in the mind.

16:31So something that I've also focused on this year is looking a lot more into women's health because my lord too we need to fly a flag for women. It's interesting of how many people I interview on this show and how rarely they get interviewed by women. Of course there are so many amazing women podcasters out there but we're very small and I do think that there is a difference of being interviewed by women than a man and I think they both hold very strong viewpoints on each but I think we do we do need a mix of the two we need the feminine and the masculine and Mo Gowder talks about this so much about the importance of having these two voices here's my hidden health tool for 2026 and it's something called emotional granularity big word what the hell does that mean the reason why I say this is a hidden health tool is definitely being part of my own journey but do you remember think back to when you were a child do you remember feeling frustrated when you couldn't explain how you felt.

17:28All you could feel was frustrated because you didn't have the vocabulary to say, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I need to sleep. And so you, you know, you felt very frustrated. This is so similar to as we develop as adults. When we're at school, we are never given any emotional health tools or learning or understanding of ourselves. We're just meant to kind of figure it out as we go along. And for some people, they have parents at home that are great at helping explain and understand their emotions and frustrations and sometimes others aren't and something that I've learned a lot through this podcast through speaking to people such as Alain to Lisa Feldman Barrett to stress researchers is how important being able to explain how you feel is now most of the times when you say to people like how are you doing you'll say like good you will say fine so yeah great some people might say I'm stressed, I'm tired, but their vocabulary is so limited.

18:22Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett came on the show and spoke to me about how language really increases reactivity. How by being so precise, if you can't explain how you're feeling, a lot of the time you will shut down and disassociate. You'll also maybe be more self-critical of yourself because you're not quite sure and you have an understanding or explanation to find the words that are out there to explain how you feel. or you might mislabel it. And what I found really interesting is how this connected to an episode with Dr. Judith Joseph. She says how she saw a lot of men coming into her clinic who were being referred for anger issues from their partners.

19:02And actually what she found out was that they weren't angry at all. They were actually very anxious, but it displayed as anger because they'd never found the right words or understandings to explain how they really felt. And so this is why understanding how you can voice your emotions which is called emotional granularity is so important for you so thinking about that this year there's an amazing tool called the wheel of emotions that you can just google online and it's got something like 200 emotions on there it's got the seven core in the middle and then it branches out into three different circles and it helps you understand how you're feeling and gives you descriptive language basically does that make you feel validated it absolutely does so that was you know an amazing learning for me last year but also seeing this in the context of having conversations with different experts this kind of always seemed to come into understanding how we explain our emotions and so with all of these things it's really resonates with me on 2025 how we really deep dived into the mind-body connection it's something that I was so fascinated by I feel it is so important for our health I think so many times we can speak about health in such linear vertical ways and we forget the importance of them coming together and I know that when I've personally done that I haven't actually been the healthiest so it's about kind of bringing them all in together and it made me think about the word success and you might have heard me mention this a few times on the show at the beginning of last year, I was really interested to go like, what does success actually mean?

20:36We're all wanting to basically get to the end goal in our health, in our work, in our relationships. And when I looked at what success meant in the Oxford Dictionary, it said three things. It said fame, wealth, and social status. Kind of put that coating on where we can actually become quite disconnected to what maybe we all feel like successes. So I'd love you guys to think, you know, for a minute, Like what does actual success look like to you? And that's really where the question that I ask at the end to every guest of what does live well, be well mean to you? Because ultimately living well and being well to me is success.

21:10I think it's a really nice way for us to start our year and think about what does that word mean for you? Does it mean peace? Does it mean joy? Does it mean a healthy, stable, safe relationship? there's so many understandings of what that means and very rarely in all the episodes that we've done have I ever really had the same answer twice a big part of that for me is one of the things that's been hardest for me to learn which is self-compassion not beating yourself up not putting too much pressure on yourself all the time or putting pressure on yourself but forgiving yourself and learning to treat myself like a best friend which is incredibly difficult anyway I'd love for you to write to me on Instagram, below in the comments on YouTube about what that means to you.

22:01I think the more that we have these conversations, the more that we define what the capitalism view is of living well, being well, and actually does connect our minds and our bodies more to what we truly want. And so I'd say, make that your goal, along with all the other ones that you want to make of 2026 of what does live well, be well really mean to you. I have loved doing this solo episode. I have been also so nervous about doing this for the first time, but I have to say this is the year that I want to make sure I'm bringing you solo episodes every month. To help me do that, I also want to bring you what's relevant.

22:36Write to me in my email, info at sarahannmacklin.com. Submit your thoughts, submit your questions. Write to me on Substack, The Compassionate Cure, which is sarahmacklin.substack, and that's my newsletter. But most of all like let's create a community of conversations online about health and why it shouldn't be this difficult and complex and why we all ultimately want the end goal and i hope that me bringing you my thoughts every month will connect us deeper i want to get to know you i love i read all of your comments they mean a massive amount to me let's go massive love to you all i hope some of those thoughts reflections on the mind body takeaways were helpful and let me know what you want to hear next month.