Heston Blumenthal: My Bipolar Diagnosis, Being Sectioned and Embracing Neurodiversity (E327)

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance App. Resonation, when it comes off, there's that feeling, it's just that little bliss moment with a massive smile that has achieved something. What an honour. What an honour. Welcome to High Performance, one of the most innovative and groundbreaking chefs of our time, Heston Blumenthal. You know, I had a real sense that I was sitting in the presence of true genius during this conversation. I mean, I normally get that with you anyway, Damien. But you couldn't join us for this one. Heston's diary was far too busy and I couldn't make it down for it, but what was it like?

0:59mate honestly it was it was incredible at Heston we know he revolutionized the food industry the way that we think about food he created the fat dark his three michelin star restaurants once voted the best restaurant in the world but this is about the cost of that great success so we we get into why and how he was sectioned a year ago we talk in great detail about his adhd diagnosis and the fact that he now understands that he's bipolar yeah interestingly Damien he also explains to us that those things are the very reason for his creativity and at one point in the conversation I ask him whether he wishes that he'd never had those and the answer is fascinating.

1:39I promise you you're going to be moved when you hear about how his wife saved his life, the true pressure of performance and how perfectionism and success really does cost. As we welcome Heston Blumenthal to High Performance.

1:57Heston, welcome to the show. Thanks, for having me. What was life like for you one year and two days ago from this conversation? I came out of hospital from being hospitalized or sectioned or however you want to call it after being in there for two months. It turned out to be bipolar that got me in the hospital in the first place. And when you were admitted to hospital, when you were sectioned, doctor said you were three or four days away from death. Can you explain how your body was being impacted to an extent? I think basically my endocrine system has started to break down. So I felt okay. I thought it was fine.

2:39I've learned so much, obviously, since the diagnosis. And one of the classic traits of bipolar is if you have a manic stage. The manic stage is, you know, you feel like you're Jesus Christ or Superman or you love everyone, everything is fantastic, you're vomiting ideas everywhere, and you don't sleep. The moon and the stars, and you look at the humidity that's coming at night, and questions, questions, questions about everything. So you can go two days, three days, I mean, some people have gone a lot longer, but without sleeping. I think that was a big cause, because I wasn't getting the sleep and the repair that I should have been getting.

3:18So what was going on in the days leading up to this moment? I'd had some hallucinations. I hallucinated a gun on the table. Turned out that this is also a classic bipolar thing when it gets quite extreme. I was getting, with my ideas, I was getting more and more obsessed about them. So like nothing else mattered. And I think I was, yeah, it was just manic. But in those moments, those highs, it was wonderful. But like everything, what goes up has to come down. these you could call them very positive manic stages can then fall into they will the more sort of high you are the more the low comes or the higher your manic manic moments are in the end my wife I would become a danger to myself and to the people that care for me around me so she had she arranged it so that I I had a couple of policemen and turn up to the house, five firemen, a doctor, an assistant.

4:26They basically injected me. They woke up in a psychiatric hospital. I didn't know where I was. My wife couldn't see me for the first, I think, two days. And then I started to know. And then I was seeing this psychiatrist. And she said, you're bipolar. and I never thought, I knew I had ADHD. I thought I might have had, or might have PTSD. I was going for the full house of neurodiverse things, although bipolar is not neurodiverse. I had no idea. I was surprised more than anything else. And the two months I spent in hospital, I was being monitored daily, not just by the doctor, but the nurses there and stuff.

5:14So you can say thanks to my wife, I had this really clear diagnosis that when I was doing the research about symptoms and signs of bipolar, I ticked nearly all the boxes. There's bipolar 1, bipolar 2, and then another bipolar 3. You can sort of flip between them. And what is bipolar 1, which is what you've got? So bipolar 1 is, if you imagine bipolar 2 let's say you've got a graph where this is energy levels and this is time average energy levels let's say are here it goes up but then drops down for long periods of time so you get long bouts of depression that's bipolar 2 bipolar 1 the energy level it goes up higher but then crashes down the downs don't they're not as long as the ones with bipolar 2.

6:15So joining the dots going backwards, when do you remember first having these periods of mania followed by a crash? Well, the funny thing is, as time goes by since me coming out of hospital, I've been looking further and further back when I was younger. When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I had a good level of road rage. For example, I get really angry at people in the car. I think I was a night rider. But I think what kept it at bay, my bipolar and my ADHD, although the ADHD I had to work at a lot for the, was in the kitchen, was I did, I did between 15 and 20 years of kickboxing and ran a club for a period of time.

7:07And then I only had a short gap and then I went into the kitchen. So I was training, I don't know, a dozen hours a week or something with the kickboxing, which creates a really good framework just to anchor the bipolar and ADHD. And then I was in the kitchen, and I didn't have a... It was my first paid job as a chef was opening the Fat Duck. So I was really rather naive. I had no idea how hard it was going to be. But I had a drive, and I wanted to cook. So I think that also inhibited or it kept at bay my bipolar and ADHD. And it's hard to know which ones, bipolar, ADHD, what are driving forces.

7:55So for the first 10 years of the fat duck, I was working 120 hours a week, just sleeping about 20 hours a week. I don't know how I did it. Wow. Was that bipolar? was it that I had no choice because I'd opened the restaurant, but also was it because of my drive of wanting to cook? One really positive thing with ADHD is if you find something you love doing, you can hyper-focus with it, as opposed to going all over the show. I remember once we had a lemon tart on the menu, this is when the menu was very simple. There was only me and another person in the kitchen. Anyway, we had a lemon tart, and to make the brulee, the crisp sugar on the top of the lemon tart, sprinkle some sugar, and then brulee it with a blowtorch.

8:49So I got the blowtorch, I turned the gas on, I walked over to the sink, and I turned on the cold tap. And I remember thinking, this is straight out of Alice in Wonderland. You can't possibly light a botox with the hot tap, with hot water, you have to light it with cold water. now was that delirium through lack of sleep through just working so much was that an adhd moment classic adhd moments are like finding your phone in the fridge so if i've lost my phone i will look in places that maybe many people wouldn't look since it wouldn't have been the first time i'd left it in the fridge

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11:10These different states of either having mania or having a crash or existing as you did with ADHD and bipolar, obviously it carries a cost like trying to light a blowtorch with a cold tap, right? Yeah. So how were you able to still be so incredibly creative, successful, dynamic, build your business, build your brand? I think that when you get to a level of delirium, you start getting into an altered state. And in those altered states, you can see things differently. I don't know if you had the feeling before where you were so tired, but then you break through that tiredness and you behave differently.

11:53Have you had that? I'm just checking that you're like, oh my God, what's this is you're telling me now? No, I've been there. Yeah. So it is an altered state. And in that altered state, then imagination and creativity, I think, flows. But you can also argue that neurodiverse is an altered state. So ADHD, for example, there are moments, you know, people with ADHD don't always have all the symptoms at the same time. But I know there's moments where my head, it's like a tumble dryer. And to focus on one thing, to find something to take my mind off, my spinning head. And sometimes packing a bag to leave the house.

12:45if you're not careful, you pack a whole load of completely irrelevant, useless objects. So it's that awareness. And that's why I think the diagnosis is so important. It's so important. Then you can do something about it. And it's not, even when I crashed after a manic phase, it wasn't for long, but I kind of enjoyed it. But then I realised it's not fair. It's not fair. I'm not being kind to myself. And most importantly, well, it reflects, I'm not being kind to the people that love me and care for me. And that just wasn't right. So all of your period of creating the fat duck, growing the fat duck, winning your Michelin stars, becoming globally celebrated, all the TV shows and all those things, those were all before you had any diagnosis at all?

13:40Any diagnosis at all. So was there chaos surrounding you? during those years? It depends from what perspective you're looking at it. Around about 2000, let's say 202, stroke three to two, that four years after that, was when I, for whatever reason, my creativity and imagination were going mad. The fat duck, the kitchen was tiny, and I think because it was so squeezed in, and it was compartmentalised, so I hyper focused on the small stuff because I wanted to know if I had a big expensive gastronomic kitchen I don't think it would have been the same thing I wanted to ask these questions why do eggs make your soufflés rise why does toast go brown when you toast it many many questions within the realms of the kitchen of the duck all my energy was being channeled or funneled into the sort of more minuti of cooking and food.

14:53And was that because you loved it? You had a real passion for what you were doing? Yeah, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Can you take us to a period where you were creating a dish? I'd love to know what the dish was and what the feeling was like for you as you built this thing. Some of the dishes have taken a couple of years to get on the menu, and then they change. So there's always tweaking and tweaking. I remember, here's one. My first book was called Family Food, and it's about getting kids in the kitchen cooking with parents, but the parents can learn from the kids. When they're younger, we think their palates, their taste buds, are a bit like their education.

15:39they're less than ours because they're younger but their taste buds know their taste buds are really heightened and their awareness at a younger age so they're much happier to try odd combinations so we can learn from them and that sort of sensei-sato communication is really valid I think it's fantastic so that was the contents of the first book so I went to this bookshop in London called Books for Cooks. And this is going there quite a lot. Anyway, I was looking for who else had written things about cooking for kids or cooking with kids. Anyway, Mr. ADHD, sidetracked, came across a book by a chef in France called Taivon from about 1300.

16:27And in this book, the book fell open. It was a translation of the manuscript, French manuscript, a recipe saying how to roast a chicken and bring it back to life. So I later found out, by the way, what the recipe, I'm going to tell you, it never existed. It was chefs trying to show off to other chefs by putting these things in the book. But the recipe was as follows. You take a live chicken, you pluck it while it's alive. You basically brush its skin with saffron and wheat germ and dripping so it looks like it's been roasted. then you put its head under its belly, tuck it under and you can rock it to sleep.

17:09Apparently it's possible to rock a chicken to sleep. Never tried it. And you put it on a plate with two roasted chickens. Then imagine you've got your big dining room with a massive long table and a huge fireplace and there's a jester, a court jester dancing around and you place down the chickens. Two of them have been roasted and the other one looks like it's been roasted and you start carving one of the roasted chickens and the chicken that's been rocked to sleep wakes up and goes, runs down the table. And in the recipe it says upsetting goblets and whatnot. I thought, why do we think that creativity is a modern thing, imagination and creativity?

17:49Because without imagination, nothing would exist. And that was the use of sound, the clucking noise. I forgot, sorry, I forgot a key element to this. How does the chicken make the clucking noise? with the roasted chickens, before you put them in the oven, you put down their throats, mercury and sulfur as a mix. And they react in the oven and make a clucking sound. Well, for one of the TV shows I did, we tested this with a roasted raw chicken, which was all from the shops, bushes because it had the neck on, and tried it. It doesn't work. And the professor we were with, it doesn't work, it's just made up.

18:32But I thought, they've used sound. And so I started getting interested and obsessed with the role that sound has on the food that we eat. And then I started working as a professor at Oxford University, Charles Spence, who put me in a sound booth with a microphone and gave me a packet of crisps. I had headphones on. So when I started to eat the crisps, I could hear the crunch almost in real time. so I was listening to my own crunch as well as feeling it when he changed the frequency of the microphone so it was less crisp let's say the crisps felt softer in my mouth and they almost felt stale and same thing you think the biscuit has gone a bit stale so after this we started playing around with sound and listening to your own noises and then putting other seaside noises in.

19:35And the seaside noise led to the sound of the sea. So this has probably happened over a period of two or three years. I got one of those amplifier boxes that you can plug a guitar in. I can't remember what it's called, but you can change the sound of plucking the guitar. We took the bacon and egg ice cream and tested it with, again, in Charles' lab, he had about a dozen people with it, tested it, have a spoonful of it and play a clucking and cracking an egg noise and the other one was sizzling bacon. You play that. So you'd eat the same thick ice cream but then the flavour was the bacon or egg flavour stronger.

20:29When you had the sizzling bacon, the ice cream tasted much more of bacon. So this was all leading numerous other experiments and eventually I wanted to do something where it was like a landscape, so seaside. So we developed this dish called Sound of the Sea, which looks like sand. Then you've got sea vegetables there and various bits of seafood and fish that have been cured and the sources of froth like the foam and it serves on a glass plate with sand underneath. And you put the headphones on and you listen. You listen to the sound. And we've had people crying at that dish, which I never thought would happen.

21:12And it's not because, oh, the dish is wonderful. It's the trigger of the sound, the sea flavours in the dish. But it takes people back to their childhood. So there's quite a long explanation. I cut it down, but that's one dish. I think it's fascinating and it leads me to wonder whether being neurodivergent is why you obsessed about these things to such a degree. I think you could argue that ADHD and small kitchen, hyper-focus, obsessed about food and cooking, what happens when we cook. all of those things together I think ADHD played a really major part of that and I don't know how many people who have got ADHD but then they haven't had the diagnosis maybe it can be a bit lost because you don't know it's really about finding something that you love and me I realise I'm not in the restaurant business is the business of emotion.

22:26And the importance of imagination, there was an amazing guy, I don't know if you came across him, but it was Ken Robinson, Sir Ken Robinson. Amazing. The late Sir Ken Robinson. The late Sir Ken Robinson. When, after he died, it's funny, it's funny, Katie's daughter called her Cat Heston, which was amazing when I met him. It was amazing. He was one of the people I wanted to meet before I died. and we became friends and after his death they asked five people to finish this sentence imagine if I think he jumped up in imagine if we'd live in a world without family and stuff mine was imagine if we lived in a world without imagination you can't imagine it we wouldn't be having we're sitting here with clothes and lights microphone, podcasts, language everything and that's to say imagination leads to creativity but I do think as I said neurodiverse is is finding something you love to do yeah so if I was to give you a famous Heston triple cooked chip yes and that chip had the power to remove your ADHD and your bipolar would you eat it?

23:43if I could put it back again if I could somehow uneat it because yes, I'd like to know what it feels like. Yeah. Not to have it. But I wouldn't change me for the world. I mean, there's things I'd prefer not to do again, but it's like with bipolar. It's not I have bipolar, I am bipolar. It's something I'll have for the rest of my life. Explain the difference. Bipolar is a chronic mental disorder. it's something, there's something genetic in it. So ADHD, you can develop ADHD. So I have bipolar, it sounds like I've got a disease that needs to be cured. And you can say the same thing for ADHD, I am ADHD.

24:38There are little nuances in language, but I have and I am, they're different. you put so much of what you have achieved down to your ADHD, right? Well, yes, although let's remember it's only a year since I came out of the hospital. So after 58, 57, 56 years of having this, I'm still learning a lot about myself. And I'm me. So that's when my answer to your chip, eating the chip, if I could remove it. I'd like to see what it's like. Yeah. just out of interest. And why would you then want to uneat the chip? If someone says, you know, a chip or a pill you could take that would just remove bipolar, I don't want to because I value my imagination too much.

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27:45When you are having a mania episode and your imagination is on fire, it's flying, you know, as you described at the start of this episode, vomiting ideas. How does it feel? It's fantastic. It's exhausting. No, I think it's exhausting for people around me. But for myself, no. again I came out of the hospital a year ago so it takes a couple of years to stabilize and my medication I'm sort of something like 90 % down on my medication from when being in the hospital so I go and see them once a month and they're tweaking my meds I put a lot of weight on with that medication also I calm down so for a period of time I was a bit like a zombie and I don't still don't have the energy that I had before I've got to be patient because I'm a year down the line and the doctor just keeps on but every now and then he just tweaks it and tweaks it so yeah I'm definitely much more calm I would like to return to the great elements of my manic imagination.

29:06That's why I said I don't want to lose that. It's just been suppressed at the moment from the medication. You're not mourning the loss of the Heston before this episode? No, I think because I have to weigh up the calmer side. Because that wonderful imagination when it flicks the other side it can get into anger. and it's a bit like a toddler that's running around laughing, playing, having a great time and then something happens and then we say, oh, they're overtired and they start having a scream. It's a bit like that really. And I said to you earlier, I've just remembered another thing. Since when I did an interview for Newsnight, I've had loads of letters coming in which is wonderful and there's one lesson this woman said at one point she thought the TV was talking to her.

30:05And I burst out laughing because it's the same thing. Really? Yeah, yeah. What would it be saying or what? Well, I think my wife said some of it might have been sparked off by I'd been looking at research, YouTube clips. It might be on, it could be on evolution, it could be on theoretical physics, really interesting stuff like that. But if I'm looking at short films, and I'm looking at a lot of them, then the algorithms of YouTube would then throw things up. And so somehow I thought it was just generally the television. It was reaching out to me. Was that not scary, though? Was there not a point where you're thinking, I know televisions don't talk to people.

30:55What's going on here? No, only after I came out of hospital. And when I got this letter, that's why I burst out laughing. And it's like, I can't believe I thought that. That's amazing. So it's obviously important to you to have these conversations, right? Because of the many other people who haven't had a diagnosis but need to hear this. Talking about it and talking to others about it. You know, I'm lucky in the sense that I've got a platform and there's many people, most people, don't have a platform and their words don't have the same impact. It's also important to say that it's the people around, the people that's around somebody who's neurodiverse or particularly bipolar, you know, they have to live with this, learn how to live with it and then they can help.

31:50What would you like them to know? well when a moment of manic mania is happening so getting overexcited basically and my missus will give me a tap on the shoulder so like yesterday she said to me because because you know this bipolar is affected by when the nights get darker earlier and it's affected by the by the moon, lunar patterns. Full moons can have a big effect on bipolar and manic highs. And I think yesterday was a wolf moon, big full moon. So she told me this. Okay, that's a tap on the shoulder for me. So just in case. And when you were sectioned, am I right in thinking that Melanie watched things unfolding over the security cameras?

32:43She saw over the... Yes, I only found that out a couple of months ago, actually. She was checking, but she had to stay away. For her to be able to make the decision must have been really difficult. Explain what you mean. Or make the decision to have me sectioned for my benefit. What would you like to say to her? I say it all the time. Thank you. Thank you, superstar. I mean, it couldn't have gone on any longer, put it that way. I would have done damage to myself. I know it's not an easy thing to talk about, but I think the reason why I feel it's so important is that I don't believe, well, I know I've never met anyone who tells me they're bipolar, right?

33:30Yeah. I don't know whether many people have now come up to you in the street and said the same thing, but the truth is that there are 14 million people in the United States who are bipolar. There are over a million people in the UK who are bipolar. These aren't insignificant numbers, right? No. We've been around, we've all been around people who are bipolar. But those people either don't know or are unable to tell us. Often, because I did the one show, which had a big impact, the news night one went crazy, 10, 15 million people. The letters started to come in from people who were bipolar or were a close friend or relative to somebody who was bipolar.

34:11However, I haven't been stopped in the street. There's probably two people I've met that told me I'm bipolar. So people would write the letters. But it's still the stigma. It's how to de-stigmatize it, which is the big challenge. It would be much better if it didn't take nine, nine and a half years to get a diagnosis. So what can we do? What needs to be the next conversation about bipolar? The NHS are now putting mental health or mental wellness at the top of the list. And already it's the biggest killer. And it's just going to get worse. Sometimes it's very hard to see it. Well, I've just become an ambassador for Bipolar UK.

35:03I keep having these conversations and hopefully people will start coming up to me and verbally expressing it. I mean, there's been hundreds or maybe thousands of letters. But the more we can speak openly about this, it's like people don't even, there's a lot of people who have had their ADHD diagnosis, but they don't want to talk about it. And the complicated thing is, I understand it's really tricky because you don't want to lose your job. Or if you're at school, by talking about it, it can have a negative effect. But I believe that if enough people talk about it, it will have a positive effect.

35:49But I think this is where we have to get to. We have to stop looking at the increased number of diagnoses of people who are neurodivergent and see it as a negative. And it's the total opposite. we should be celebrating people who are different, celebrating the power that people who are neurodiverse can bring to society. I mean, there's that great phrase, isn't there, that neurodivergent people are the people that will change the world and have changed the world. And I think it's absolutely right. I think probably 80 % of the people who sat in your chair and have been a guest on High Performance are on the spectrum in some way, or neurodivergent in some way.

36:27Yeah, and I think it's the same, similar figures in the kitchen. definitely, loud noises is another thing that you struggle with. Yes, a Harley Davidson going by. Oh my God, that's pain. It's like an invasion of my hearing. And I don't know, I'm hypersensitive in terms of smell, all of the senses. But that's been magnified by my interest in the whole multi-sensory world I'm kind of created. so like if you can train your nose you can train yourself to smell things that other people can't smell it's like you can train your ears to be sensitive to certain sounds and I think a lot of people in the neurodiverse range are sensory sensory wise they are hypersensitive I want to talk to you about a few life lessons you've picked up along the way yes because you are a true artist a maverick, a genius you've been called all those things over the years I love the phrase every child is born an artist how can we make sure that we remain an artist all our lives?

37:44I think the schooling system has changed significantly for the better but certainly as Ken said the modern, current education system came from Victorian times to meet the needs of industrialism. That meant the two most important subjects at school were language and maths, because you need that for business. So all things to do with imagination and creativity in the arts were at the bottom of that, let's say, Premier League table. I was involved in rewriting the GCSE for food and nutrition, which is optional at GCSE but at A level you can't take it now this is crazy on many levels one we don't if we don't eat we die I mean it's as simple as that also what we eat has shaped us and the way we've harvested our foods has also shaped us I realise that cooking and eating is the only subject that every other subject comes under because there's maths for the recipe.

38:57You've got physics because you heat things up and things change. And that change creates chemistry, molecules and stuff. And then we consume it, biology. And then we film cultures and history. And then you put art, put geography in there. It's language. Everything can come under cooking. And so to get rid of it at A-level, it should be I think it shouldn't be optional at O level it shouldn't be optional at GCSE it should be obligatory there's a phrase that I want to read out to you and get your reaction to fear knocked on the door faith answered there was nobody there yes why is that so powerful for you?

39:43because you can't have hot without cold fast without slow tall without short fat without thin etc etc etc so we live in a world of adversity human beings we i mean we need adversity really to react to keeps us alive we don't like it but it's there so if fear you're scared of something if you're you have to have fear because without you can't have belief without fear and vice versa but your belief is stronger than the fear you're going to go with the direction of belief or faith if your fear is stronger than the belief you'll go in that direction and fear of failure there's two I sort of see it as a human being and a human doing so think of the human being as the parasympathetic nervous system which is imagination, creativity it's feminine energy and there isn't really fear of failure give it a go and if you fail we'll learn something from it on the masculine side I'd say human doing which is the sympathetic nervous system and that is in productivity or production you obviously you need it also in teamwork but there is a fear of failure there but both of those sides are really important they bounce off each other have you found balance?

41:10balance if you take fast and slow I think what people think They think balance is right in the middle of fast and slow. It's like I'm flatlining it, straight line. But life doesn't work like that. Life throws us all sorts of things and then we respond. And it's the response to lots of these things that make us who we are. For people that have listened to this really engaging, honest, open, powerful conversation, what would you like to leave ringing in their ears for living their own high-performance life? Find something you love to do. It's amazing what's out there to discover. And I think because food and cooking, food and cooking and eating, is just about the most complex thing the human body does.

42:00It gave me, I didn't realize how much was behind that. It gave me the opportunity to look at all the senses and emotions. So my world was, well, it still is such a massive world that there's no sort of end to it. I love it. And look, I know you're in a, still in the recovery phase from what happened a year ago. Yes. Do you plan? Do you know what you'd still love to do? For me, there's nothing like imagination. When it comes off, there's that feeling, it's just like that little bliss moment with a massive smile that achieves something. So you want to look, you're going to look for those moments, right?

42:38I'm going to look for those moments, yes. I believe you'll find them and I hope you do because your imagination brought so much to so many people. not least yourself. I hope you can find a path back to it. Yes. Yes, I will. I will and I am. Good. Thanks, man. Thanks. And that's it. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. A huge thanks to Heston for being so open, honest and vulnerable in this conversation. And if you want to find out more information about ADHD or bipolar, then check out the show notes. Before I go, I just want to let you know about the High Performance Foundation, something we've created to enable young people, no matter their background, to be able to write their own story and believe it's within.

43:20You know, there's a crisis in UK schools with young people not developing the social and emotional skills they need to thrive. And so we've created something called Game Plan. It's an in-class resource where students can get the very best bits of high performance to help them build those emotional skills, the resilience, the soft skills that we know they need to thrive in the real world. And we want you to come on the journey with us. Whether you want to co-create something with us, So whether you work in a school and you just want to know more, please get in touch with the High Performance Foundation team today by visiting our website, highperformancefoundation.org.

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