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

This is the time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind and spend time with the people we love. To celebrate, I have decided to re-release a conversation that took place on this podcast almost 6 years ago now with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher and one of the world's leading experts in the science of kindness. He is also the author of multiple bestselling books including Why Kindness Is Good For You and How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body. 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 actually recorded it. In our conversation, we explore many different themes including: How empathy and kindness can impact various markers of our health, including the functioning of our immune systems and our cardiovascular health Why David calls oxytocin the ‘kindness hormone’ How exactly we can use visualisation 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 one hundred and twenty-five more. David is such a wonderful human being who is doing his very best to help create a kinder and more compassionate world. 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……. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/602 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 0:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

• 0:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher, and someone who is considered to be one of

• 1:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  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

• 2:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  can impact various markers of our health, including our immune system and cardiovascular system. Why 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.

• 2:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 3:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you've come down from?

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Dunblane, central Scotland. Famous latterly 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.

• 3:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because of the Murray brothers?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's amazing, isn't it?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  I picked up a racket for the first time in my mid 40s and I was awful.

• 3:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And now?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Well, I'm working up through the leagues. I've been doing a lot of mental exercises, visualization, a lot of training and stuff. I love it.

• 3:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Fantastic.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Play three, four times a week.

• 3:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's so interesting that this small town, Dunblane, I wonder if we compare the tennis participation rates in Dunblane, the home of Andy and Jamie Murray, or certainly the former home of them, with the rest of the United Kingdom. I wonder if it's artificially skewed upwards.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Probably, definitely.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Thriving tennis community.

• 4:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Well, you mentioned a couple of things there, which we'll probably come to later on. But David, I think I'm really fascinated by your journey. So you started working in the pharmaceutical industry. And now you don't.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. So why don't 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?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what I basically write books on that really broadly cover the different ways that your mind and emotions and your behaviour has physical effects, you know, 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 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, three sisters. My youngest sister was born in mid 1976.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Postnatal depression was not well understood at the time and my mum didn't really get the right treatment. In fact, 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 started, 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.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  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 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. But 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 was, she'd say things like, I can do it. It's all in the mind, mind over matter.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  So having these conversations with my mum, it's no surprise that my interest started was, became the power of the mind and what your mind can do and the effect your mind has on your body. So 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, navigate that course through some of those difficult days. So that was

• 7:36Speaker 00

  my, so I was so fascinated after four years of really my own many 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 improve our health and to, you know, make life a little bit better for us.

• 7:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  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?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  I was 11 years old. My main, I'd just started secondary school. But my main, 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 really, 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. It's all I was interested in.

• 8:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  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, 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 have faith, let's say. And I'm just wondering, you know, as you got through your education and, you know, studied science more and more to a higher and higher degree, did you ever start to get skeptical about the importance of the mind? Because 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.

• 9:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 fascinated. Did you go through this period of skepticism somewhere and then come out the other side? Or what happened?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Surprisingly, not so much. What I would say is I just forgot about it.

• 9:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  You know, you get so, I mean, I, 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 Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking, when I was halfway through my PhD. And it almost reminded me of the passion I had. And I remember, you know, I was literally in the middle, in my second, 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, in, you know, at the time, the book was just about positive thinking, but it wasn't just about positive thinking. I, I, I looked at that as not just about positive thinking,

• 10:33Speaker 00

  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? Even at the time, the idea of writing, but it just seemed like something I knew I had to do one day.

• 11:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  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, you know, for people who are not familiar, the way we often analyze drugs is we do something called randomized controlled trials. So, you know, very, very crudely speaking, you take two groups of people. 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?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then you see who has, you know, has there been a statistically significant increase or benefit in one of the groups, i.e. the group who's taken 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? In almost a derogatory way. But nonetheless, if you think about it, even if in that hundreds, let's say that group

• 12:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  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?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And is that what, is that what happened with you? You thought, hold on a minute, well, how can we explain that?

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Pretty much. And seeing it, because, because I was a chemist so close to building the drug, I mean, literally, organic chemist 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. And I remember asking my colleagues and they would just dismiss it. Oh, it's just a placebo effect. And it was a sweeping movement of the right hand, even left hand. And it just, I think you learn it on your first day. It's just a placebo effect.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  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 painkiller, a placebo, what 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.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  But in actual fact, believing that this is a drug caused their brain to produce natural versions of morphine. So morphine's 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 pain, 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, realising 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.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  And I thought, no one really knows about this. Professionals, laypeople don't really understand.

• 15:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 was a drug, whether it's another treatment, that's going to help. But it can't just be the power of positive thinking, right? I mean, I guess you, you find what you're looking for, right? So if people aren't looking for that, it's easy to.

• 15:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, diminish it and just think it doesn't matter. And I've got to say, you know, I think still as a medical profession, I don't think we take the placebo seriously enough. I mean, what do you think? You know, do you think things have changed in the last 10, 20 years?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  It's definitely changing. I think when 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, of the way in which even the way you talk to someone, how that can make them feel. In 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

• 16:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  How it made them feel. And what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system.

• 16:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 16:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  And Dave, when I hear that, it reminds me of something that I often say, I've said it, you know, to the public before, I've said it when I, when I teach doctors, that the number one skill for any healthcare professional, for me, is their ability to connect.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 17:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then secondly to that, communicate with the person in front of them. For me, that trumps knowledge.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  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?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  It's empathy.

• 17:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's empathy. If you feel, as a human being, if you feel heard, if you feel listened.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 17:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because when you've connected with them, when they feel heard by you, they're open to listening to what you have to say.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 17:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whereas if you just go charging in and say, look, you need to lose weight and 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.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 actually deeply connects with them.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  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 that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the Mother Teresa effect. I think it was a study, I think it was at Yale or one of the other big American universities. They got over a hundred 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. And 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.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards. And that's because for the hour or two afterwards, they were still talking about, didn't 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. It just lifted that little antibody level.

• 19:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's not just the person who received that, it's also if you're watching that.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't know, that's been studied, but I wouldn't.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  It has actually.

• 19:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Has it?

• 19:57Speaker 00

  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 in 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 moved, inspired by watching like a five minute clip from what used to be the Oprah Winfrey Show.

• 20:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, it's really incredible. And this is right up my street, honestly. This is, this is becoming clearer and clearer to me as every year passes since I qualified from 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 that not everything can be quantified with just blood results and test results and just, oh, do this, do that. There's just something deeper. 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.

• 21:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  What you said about secretory or S I G A is so interesting to me. I've also studied immunology and for people wondering what S I G A is, 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% or so of the immune system activity is in and around your gut, which is super interesting.

• 21:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's called your mucosal immune system and the primary, the main sort of defence molecule of that is SRG, secretory RGA. So to think that that can go up with this kind of compassion.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Watching compassion being practised.

• 22:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  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?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's some research looking at the more compassion that, let's say, a doctor feels, as 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 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. I mean, that's incredible. Isn't that amazing?

• 22:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  They recovered 50% faster compared to people who, when there was no, or there wasn't enough contact and connection during the consultation.

• 22:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I find, I find the idea that it's not just the giver, but the receiver or the watcher also gets the biochemical change. And I don't know if you're familiar with someone called Professor Francis McGloan.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  No.

• 23:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I interviewed him on the podcast about a year ago. He helped me actually write the chapter on touch in my second book, The Stress Solution. He's, he's one of the world's leading researchers in touch, basically.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 23:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 23:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  And he talks about, you know, these two different kinds of touch nerve fibres. You've got one, which is the fast one, which simply tells you where you've been touched. You know, if I touch you on your forearm, you know, oh, wrong, you've just touched me on my forearm. But if you stroke someone on the forearm. It does something completely different.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 23:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And well, his work is showing that it's a different kind of nerve fibre. It's called the CT affront that goes up to the, a different part of the brain, the emotional brain. And when you, 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 affront nerve fibres, so that that slower nerve fibre that tells, that gives you that nice warm cuddly feeling, most of them are on your upper back and your shoulder.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 24:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 that it's the same hormone oxytocin. So, you know, I mean, what do you make of that?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  See, actually, you mentioned the animal thing. I love animals. I lost my dog a few years ago. He had bone cancer, 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, is 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. Front page about 10 years ago, picture of a yellow Labrador.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  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%. In the human and nearly doubled in the dog for doing nothing other than warm playful interactions, rubbing the tummy, just warm interaction.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  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. Cause oxytocin has tremendous cardiovascular benefits.

• 27:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  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, 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.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  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, many. 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

• 28:22Speaker 00

  and connection, then they're physiologically opposite. Even psychologically, there's some studies showing that emotionally we get the opposite effects. Because many of 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 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 thing, 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

• 29:07Speaker 00

  you initiate through empathy, compassion, touch, emotional warmth, any of these 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 of 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 suggest that aggression and hostility, for example, reduce levels of the kindness hormone, oxytocin. And therefore, we take away a vital part of cardio protection because oxytocin is now

• 29:51Speaker 00

  called a cardio protective 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.

• 30:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, David, my mind is blown. This is.

• 30:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, this is so fascinating, so fascinating. And I'm drawing all kinds of connections in my head over things that I've been talking about for years, things I've noticed with patients. And this is filling in a few more gaps and it's all starting to knit together. You know, 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.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 30:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's incredible. But then when you try and make the case that oxytocin might be the cardioprotective hormone, then suddenly it's all starting to make sense. But I guess we have to, we have to look at things on an evolutionary or through an evolutionary lens, really, to try and figure this out, right? Like I said, you know, why would evolution put these touch receptors on our back? Well, to promote social contact, you would think.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  It's nature rewarding you, saying, yes, more of this, please. I will make you healthy. Keep doing that.

• 31:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  In fact, do you know the gene for oxytocin, 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, 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 says, that tells you is it's vital for the survival of all species. I 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.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  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, I 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.

• 32:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Absolutely. And then there's the study with the rumor. Orphanages where where kids, you know, were fed and watered, but they didn't get touch.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the ones who didn't get any any touch have got higher incidence as they're older, autoimmune problems, behavioural problems in it. 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.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  I know.

• 32:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Than we are to other humans. So if you show your smartphone compassion and you touch your smartphone, does it also release oxytocin?

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Well, do you know, you've made me think there.

• 33:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was joking, but unless you're going to pull out a research study.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  No, I wasn't. I was going to pull out the film Cast Away with Tom Hanks.

• 33:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  And I, you know, remember, was it Wilson he called that? Was it a coconut or a football? He called it Wilson?

• 33:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  I have not seen it, actually.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  All right, well, here's the.

• 33:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  But Gareth is videoing this in the background, nodding his head furiously, so.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  So Tom Hanks, Cast Away, he 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. It was grief, it was loss. And I think if you can bond even with, you know, make a joke of it, hugging a tree, it doesn't matter. If you can bond with, even in that case, an inanimate object, it doesn't matter. 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,

• 34:03Speaker 00

  with a, you know, a teddy bear, something that you feel you can bond with, it's that bonding itself that releases the oxytocin. So we're wired to bond and to connect.

• 34:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. And, you know, the idea of a child with their teddy or even this film, inanimate objects. And again, yeah, it 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 affection, but I guess. Not doing that, are we?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And 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 maybe something happened to you that, you know, that the only thing you had was the 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 looking at your emails.

• 35:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I guess in some ways, well, in many ways.

• 35:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 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 as you said before, it's about the feeling that changes inside you that actually leads to a lot of those biochemical changes.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. So it's, you know, I, 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 it 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 behaviour 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 a different way of thinking.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  And not always successful, but oftentimes it will make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person. And 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, during the time that I've been really working on the mind body connection, but particularly when I've been focusing kindness, I wasn't, I wasn't meaning as a horrible

• 37:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you can cultivate this as a feeling, as a practice. And I think for many of us, 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 turn it into your reality. And it's something, you know, it's something that I talk about all my kids loads, is this idea of being kind. And we play this gratitude game every dinnertime that I've mentioned on this podcast before. So I don't need to mention the exact nature of that game again. But sometimes we do add on a question to

• 38:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  say, well, what have I done today? What kind thing have I done today? And we go around and we have to think about it. And we once did that for about three weeks every day.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 38:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, I think initially it was a bit tricky. It's, 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 mommy and daddy at dinnertime what kind thing they did today. And so it almost, I guess, in some ways, it's sort of playing back to what you were 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.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  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's a practice. So anything that you do to get better at is something that you practice. So I think when you practice being kind, that's amazing. Game that you play with the kids. Have you, actually, out of interest, have you noticed that as 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?

• 39:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hundred percent.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 39:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  And 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.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, 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 in my children is also upskilling me in that area as well. And I noticed that a lot in my interactions now on social media and that, you know, even when someone, which is very rare these days, but if someone's left a snidey comment or said something to attack me, 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

• 40:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  argument to it, but even if there wasn't, it just feels like the right thing to do.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  It does.

• 40:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it feels nicer and you sleep better and you don't get agitated as much.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 40:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think that whole idea that the kindness is the opposite of stress is a really beautiful concept. What happens when we get angry? Like, I mean, I know from a stress perspective in terms of the stress hormones, and I have seen anger that we hold on to for years and resentment.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is toxic. It can absolutely raise your blood pressure. And I've got a few patients of mine who I couldn't get their blood pressure down with medication, with diets, with Lysol changes in a way that I would always, you know, I would always go for nutrition and First, until they started to let go of anger that they were holding on to. Is that something you're familiar with?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, 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 mean is if you've got pent up and stored up anger, it's better out than in. In fact, I read a book recently called expressive writing by a professor called James Pennebaker. 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.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  And you basically outline what happened, how you felt, how it's affected your life kind of thing, just some way, just that's a basic structure to vent. And sometimes you can swear and you could anger out, but the idea, the act of expressing it gradually has an amazing effect. Because in one of the studies, 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.

• 42:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's incredible. And for people listening who are not familiar with what an endotoxin is, you know, one way of describing it is that inside your gut, we've got lots of different bacteria, you know, trillions of bacteria and other organisms. And, you know, we very simplistically consider them to be good and bad, which is far too simplistic. But essentially, some of them, those bacteria are called what we call gram negative. And on their coats, you've got something called lipopolysaccharide or LPS, it's a lot of 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

• 43:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Simply just by doing expressive writing. And they found a lot of other studies that 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 of visits to the medical centre. And they found that those who did the expressive writing had significantly lower need to visit the medical centre. Having just got anger and hurt and trauma out of their system.

• 43:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  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. And we're seeing loads of good evidence that 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 unprocessed emotions that I've seen in my own life. I've seen my own flexibility improve dramatically, not by stretching every day, but by releasing some emotions that I'd held on to, which is simply incredible.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  And you know, because if we don't, then it's possible to start fitting the cardiovascular that starts. I mean, one of the, I guess, one of my favourite titles of a of a study is called marital conflict relations and coronary artery calcification, or CAC for short. And I think you can work, most people can work it with that. It 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 for half an hour. And they they videotaped them and they scored displays, you know, language and displays of kindness and compassion and gentleness and patience.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  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 was really people you could 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, the group who were softer people, they'd normal, what you would call soft arteries.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  When you, when you controlled in the study for diet and exercise, smoking, drinking, et cetera, the only difference really was how you behaved in that half an hour. And that was taken as a proxy for normal behaviour. 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 it out of our system, it can end up having serious negative consequences.

• 46:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and I think we all need to find ways to process those feelings 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, if 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.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 46:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that stress to a certain degree. Another tip that actually a friend of mine gave me, he uses it himself, I have tried it a couple of times. It's like if someone makes you mad, or you get frustrated with something, write an email back to them, but don't press send.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I can't tell you, it is incredibly beneficial because as you've already demonstrated with some of the research you've cited, there's something about the act of not just keeping it going around your mind, going around your body, you are processing it in some way. You're writing it out, you're talking it out, that is processing.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, and it's, we shouldn't underestimate how.

• 47:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, how valuable simple tools like this really are.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  I know, because, you know, one of the things I I've noticed is we think of a feeling or an 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 you don't smile when you're happy because you remember to smile. It's a reflex reaction because the the zygomaticus major muscle that pulls your lips into a smile is is connected in some way to the, say, call them the happy centres of the brain. Similarly, 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 onto the muscles, but it goes the other way as well.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  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 at 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 on your own, it's almost like your brain hears, I've got this, I must feel quite relaxed.

• 48:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  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 wanted to express themselves, they used their body to to express. So so what happened is there 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 gets 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.

• 49:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I spoke to a lot of therapists recently who, you know, work on people's bodies, whether it's a sports massage therapist, whatever kind of therapist, but they will tell you.

• 49:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  That you can feel, or they can feel, particularly when they've been doing it for a period of years. I said, I can tell what's going on in that person's life. I can feel how stressed 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.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I guess, David, you know, as you're telling me, you know, these stories and this research. You know, I keep thinking back to you, as you say, 20 years ago in the pharmaceutical industry. And, 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, 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, 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?

• 50:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  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, do they know? Are you still in touch with them?

• 51:35Speaker 00

  I'm in touch with a couple of them who are actually greatly supportive, you know? Because I, I find, even when I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, it wasn't that people were so skeptical about things, they just didn't know. Most of the stuff I talk about, they just didn't know. And it's not like, I, I think we, we often have this perception, if someone is educated in a particular way, then they must know everything about everything. And it's, you know, many, many people are specialized in their own particular field. And I, I learned when I was there that nobody had any idea about the placebo effect, despite the fact we see it in the data, the drug trial data every day. But no one actually knew anything about it. So.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  The colleagues that I'm still in touch with, I think some of them probably think it's a bit kind of woo woo. But most of them that I'm, that I've been in touch with over the years are greatly supportive. In fact, they're so fascinated by it. Isn't this amazing? I had no idea, for example, that, you know, if you, like, you mentioned visualization, that if you visualize moving your body, then in some ways your brain processes that as if you're actually doing it. I remember telling one of my former colleagues that, they go, what? Really? So I got the brain scans and showed him, he's like, whoa, amazing. And it's not that, you know, I think skepticism is sometimes a product of just not knowing.

• 52:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  It just doesn't sound possible. It's not that you know, it just doesn't sound, because I've never heard anything like that before.

• 52:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not within your frame of reference. It's not the education model which you've been taught. It never came into that.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  So therefore, there probably is a natural skepticism.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  But as you say, the way to change that is to give them the science in a way that they already understand it and go, hey, look, did you know that? And I, I agree. Most people would be like, oh, that is so interesting. There's a lot of research on that, isn't there, about, well, yes, how influential our minds are over our bodies. But I think I've written one of your blog posts on your website about,

• 53:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think it's a research paper about if you imagined flexing your finger, right, for 15 minutes a day.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  For what, three months, was it?

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Three months, yeah.

• 53:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, what happened?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so what happened, just, just to go back a step.

• 53:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, back up, sure.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  So a professor at Harvard, very famous neurologist called Alvaro Pascal Leon, did a study where he got volunteers to play a sequence of five notes on a piano. So they basically put their hands flat on a table and went plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk, with each of it with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, up and down a scale for two hours on five consecutive days. Now, that, it's not fully two hours, that's tiring. You might do like a minute of plonk, plonk, plonk, then a couple of minutes rest, a minute, a couple of minutes rest. But for two hours, they had their brains scanned every day on the region connected to the finger muscles, and it underwent significant change. We now call that neuroplasticity. So it massively changed and, and so about 30 to 40 times, that's fair enough. It's what you now expect from repetition of movement.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  But while they were doing that, a separate group of people put their hands flat on the table. Closed their eyes and imagined that they were playing the five notes. No movement. It's called kinesthetic imagery. And what that means is you imagine how it feels as if you were really doing it. You're not necessarily seeing it. You could see it if you want, but the key is to imagine the feelings as if you really are moving your finger muscles, but you're not. They had their brain scanned every day and their same region of their brain had also changed by 30 to 40 times. And if you put the brain scans side by side, you cannot tell the difference between those who played the notes with their fingers, those who played the notes in their mind. So that's given birth to a lot of research, including the little finger research. That was, I think that was done at the Cleveland Institute in the States.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  And what they did, got volunteers to do 15 extensions and contractions. You know, scientists have to really nail the, tell you exactly. It's like extend the little finger 15 times and contract it. Extend it, contract it. 15 times, 20 seconds rest. 15 times, 20 seconds rest. 15 times, 20 seconds rest. Like 15 reps at a time for quarter of an hour for three months. And they got 53% stronger. While they were doing that, a separate group of people closed their eyes, hands flat on the table, in kinesthetic imagery. They imagined they were doing the 15 extensions and contractions, but no movement at all. They got 35% stronger. Cause this was, at the start and the end of the study, they put their finger in a

• 56:03Speaker 00

  machine and lifted a wee set of weights up to see how strong they were. So by just imagining that you'd moved your finger, they'd got 35% stronger versus 53. Now, someone skeptical, when I first talked about this, I said, that wasn't 53% like those moving the finger, but it also wasn't zero. Here is 35% improvement in strength for doing nothing at all, other than imagining the feelings as if you really were moving your fingers.

• 56:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's, it's just incredible. And then it makes me think of.

• 56:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  The untapped potential we all have within us that, you know, we're looking at a particular component of health, let's say. You know, one thing I try and do on this podcast is to broaden out that conversation around health. To say there are so many different factors that play a role. But what you're saying, David, really is really very profound for a lot of people. That our minds, how we visualize things, they can absolutely play a difference in our body.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, it's incredible to the idea that visualization works. So because I, I wasn't familiar with some of that research. But I've always done it myself. I've always talked about it with my patients. And I've always said, look, if the top athletes in the world visualize so that they can have peak performance in their chosen activity or their race. Well, you kind of want peak performance in your own life.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, whatever that means to you. So why would you not use that tool? Oh, it's good enough for Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps, but it's not good enough for me. It doesn't really make any sense, does it? And I know that many pro golfers visualize

• 57:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  the night before they play, they literally are visualizing being on the tee. The exact shot shape they want their ball to make, what their club they're going to play next. They're going to visualize it all the way until it goes in. I remember reading stuff like this a while ago. And when I did get into golf a few years back, I would often do that on a Friday night before my rounds. I would actually visualize, and you know what? It makes a difference. And, and I think this then plays into this whole idea that can the brain tell the difference between vivid imagery and reality?

• 58:30Speaker 00

  And it doesn't seem to. And in fact, there's, there's a number of related studies in almost different fields that tell you that. I mean, for example, it's more obvious if you think of stress. Your brain doesn't really know the difference between whether you're in a stressful situation or whether you're thinking about anticipating it or remembering it. Similarly, your brain produces, you still produce the kindness hormone oxytocin, whether you're being kind watching it or even closing your eyes and thinking about it and feeling the same feelings, you don't have to be there. With movement, in fact, all the top sports people, even there's even studies on rehabilitation from stroke. And there's even been a meta-analysis recently, gold standard statistical analysis,

• 59:15Speaker 00

  that looked at all the studies of stroke and they found typically people who've had a stroke would do six weeks of physiotherapy sessions. But in these studies, and it wasn't people who'd just had a stroke, one study, one of the patients 14 years ago, and everyone does physiotherapy, but half of them, in addition to the physiotherapy, at the end of their session, they do 30 minutes or so of visualization. Well, they have to visualize repetitively movements that they are familiar with. So imagine reaching for a glass of water, taking a drink, putting it back down. Imagine reaching, drinking repetitively. And in all of the studies, those who do visualization on top of physiotherapy recover much faster and much more in that six-week period than those who just do physiotherapy alone. So there's

• 59:59Speaker 00

  a number of different ways the brain isn't distinguishing. Even eating, there's a study by a professor called Kerry Morwedge, found that looking at the way that the brain suppresses appetite, I think it's leptin it produces, isn't it?

• 1:00:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  That brain suppresses appetite when you've eaten a certain amount. And they found that if a person was just imagining eating, so they got people to imagine eating lots of sweets or lots of cubes of cheese versus just a little amount of sweets and a little amount of cubes of cheese. And they found that the more the person imagined eating, the more it activated the "I'm full" part of the brain and their appetite was suppressed. And in the paper, they reported that the difference between real and imaginary, even when it comes to eating, seems to be a bit kind of blurry.

• 1:00:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  So that could almost be a strategy for people who struggle with food cravings, I'm guessing. But you know, something is worth trying.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, what happens if you've got a craving for that chocolate and you think about it and you imagine it on your tongue and that you're eating it and you imagine it sort of going down your esophagus into your tummy and that warm feeling. Look, I've not tried that with patients as a strategy, but why not?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what's the downside?

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  I'm wondering, because I've thought of this, I've thought quite a lot about this and I'm wondering because the body responds to vivid imagery and I'm, I'm, I don't know the answer to this, but I wonder if imagining eating chocolate will affect blood sugar. I don't know, I really don't know.

• 1:01:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wouldn't that be fascinating?

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  It would be fascinating to test it. It might be better, not so much for food cravings, but if you, for losing weight, imagine eating your dinner before you eat it and then imagine eating something healthy and at least maybe produce something healthy, but at least it'll suppress your appetite. So you might find yourself eating less. I, I, I don't know the answer, but I've thought about it a little bit.

• 1:01:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  It really is super, super interesting. You know, you mentioned at the start that you came down from Dunblane and you sort of gave a little hint there that you took up tennis because everyone around you is playing tennis. And so you've taken it up in your 40s and you thought you weren't very good, but now you're playing through the leagues. And you mentioned visualization and then I clocked that I thought, okay, well, what's going on there? So David, tell us how you're going to be playing at Wimbledon next year.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I might, I might go the year after. But now here's the thing.

• 1:02:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  And take us back to when you started and what happened when you started. Just take us through that journey.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  So I, I started playing tennis in Dunblane. Most people in, in the leagues have been playing since they're children, very latest since they're teenagers. Very unusual for someone to start playing for the first time in their mid 40s. So I started to really enjoy it because I realized it was quite scientific. The coach would, every Wednesday night there's coaching and the coach would say, this is how you hold the racket. And if you turn it at an angle and, and lift the racket from low and move it to high, you, you, you put topspin on the ball and it keeps it in the court. And I thought, this is quite scientific. So I thought, this is great fun. I was very resistant to playing tennis, but thought, I'm going to do this. So I joined the league systems and for two years I was officially

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  the second worst tennis player in Dunblane, officially. And, and I say second worst, there's like three or four league seasons per year. They last a couple of months. I think there's four a year we do. They last a couple of months. And at the bottom, there's usually me, second bottom for two years. So it was like eight league, eight box league seasons right at the bottom. And the only reason I wasn't bottom is because you get a point for showing up. So it's not like football and the Premiership where you get three points for a win, one point for a draw, nothing for a loss. In Dunblane Box Leagues, to encourage you to play, you get one point for showing up, four points for a win, et cetera. So I always got six points for playing six matches because it's four leagues of seven players.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Anyway, so for two years, my average losing margin was six love, six one. I hadn't won a single set of tennis in two years in the box leagues. And I was getting a bit demoralised and I thought, you know, I've helped to coach people, athletes, golfers, you know, from time to time, explained how visualisation works, how you would apply it to your life, et cetera. I thought, why don't I try this? So it was exactly four weeks to the next box league season and I thought, I'm going to science this up, I'm going to do it. So I decided I would pick the serve and I'd pick one of the most difficult serves. Do you know what? In all of sports, the tennis serve is the second most complex move in all of sports. Most people think it's, you know, surely not. The number one is the pole vault.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  The reason why it's so complex is because most people think you just hit the ball with a flat racket, but in actual fact, a pro will turn the racket side on and face the opposite way and rotate their body and sweep the racket at an angle over or up through the ball, depending on what kind of serve they want. And there's a serve called the kick serve that's very, very difficult. And I thought, I'm going to visualise. So I decided I'd visualise 10 serves to one side and 10 serves to the other side every day. Within two days of visualisation, couldn't do it, it was so difficult. And the reason why is because you need to have what's called a mental representation. You need to know what you're imagining. It's okay when I talked about the study with stroke, they were using, imagining things

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  that they were familiar with, like reaching for a glass of water. In fact, you've never done a tennis serve, you can't visualise it correctly. So I used a little trick of neuroscience called action observation. In many ways, not only can your brain not distinguish between whether you're doing something or imagining it, your brain can't really distinguish much between whether You're doing something, imagining or watching someone else doing it, providing you watch repetitively. It's called action observation. It gets a lot of research now in sports science. So I obtained a video from Andy, of Andy Murray doing serving. I cut it down to about five seconds and I watched it 3000 times. That's how to activate action observation, not in one go. I printed out a little table in Microsoft Word, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Week one, week two, week three, week four. So I had roughly 30 days to do this. So I watched it 100 times a day for 30 days, just on replay. And that's just conditioning the brain circuits as if you're visualizing. And then after a couple of days, my mental representation was absolutely crystal clear. I could see a professional kick serve crystal clarity in my mind. So then after the second or third day, 10 visualizations of hitting the serve to one side, 10 to the other. Once a week, I went down to the court, hit a few balls. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I won the league. I literally went from having never won a set to winning the division. Then I won the next division without dropping a set. So then I was up to the second division and all that. So I went from the fourth to the third to the second.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  That's when you're getting into the really much tougher players who've been playing literally since childhood. And I'm not trying to impress anyone, but just to impress upon you that my improvement was in large part related to the volume of visualization, the fact that I'd used this visualization of a particular shot repetitively.

• 1:06:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, just so incredible. Look, I'm trying to think about the listener who is thinking, okay, I don't want to be a sportsman. I have no interest in tennis. I don't know, but they might be, I don't know, nervous about public speaking and they've got to present someone next week or in front of their colleagues.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So

• 1:07:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  can we say that if they are scared of public speaking for a week leading up to the event, they can every evening in bed or just, you know, sitting down in a quiet space, visualize. Walking onto that stage, what it feels like, who is in the audience, what the, I don't know, what the smell will be like, I don't know. Is this something that we can all use in our own lives for whatever we want to achieve?

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Exactly. In fact, you hit the nail on the head there because the way to do it, the way to apply this to say, public speaking, if you have a fear of that, or even if you, if there's someone you feel nervous around, for example, is you visualize from that moment, let's say you're on the stage, you're getting up from the stage, your name's called, and what you're visualizing, you've got to pay attention to, as you're imagining, pay attention to how your shoulders feel, pay attention to your gait, how fast you're walking, pay attention to your facial muscles. And what you're actually doing is you've got to visualize the movement of your body, because that's what the brain wires in. The brain will wire that repetitive movement of the body as if you're really doing it. So you're not, many people think if you want to visualize public speaking, just they go right to the end and see a standing ovation. But in actual fact,

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  what I'm suggesting is you visualize the, your physical body, the way you would move your body if you feel, I've got this, I've got something, I can't wait to tell them, I'm feeling relaxed, I'm feeling confident. And so visualize the entire movement of your body, how you hold and move your body as you get to the stage and then visualize the first opening two or three lines. So you're literally paying attention to your body. Similarly, if you're visualizing, you know, let's say someone who makes you feel nervous, maybe it's your boss at work or something, then normally what you would do is your body would tense up and your speech would be affected. So visualize moving up towards your, your boss, your supervisor, and visualize your body being relaxed, your back, your spine being straight, your shoulders relaxed, your head up, visualize

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  your rate of breathing, paying attention to your physical organism, how you hold and move your body. And that's what the brain wires in as if you're really doing it. So if you do that for a week, leading up to the presentation or the meeting with the boss, then you'll find your brain will have wired enough that that might go into default, it might go into an automatic, or certainly it would be easier to be like that than had you not done the visualization.

• 1:09:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And I think for me, there's probably an added bonus there, which is, Apart from your brain now being there and by the time you rock up to that event, your brain feels I've been here before. I think it has another purpose, which is you are proactively doing something to prepare. You're not stressing and worrying and getting anxious. You're going, okay, cool, that's going to be nerve wracking, but I can do something each day now that's going to get me stronger for that event.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an amazing feeling because I think many people in society do feel disempowered, like we don't know what to do to improve ourselves. And I think just given that little bit, it gives you confidence, it boosts your self-esteem and you suddenly feel I'm in control or I am controlling more of this than I ever thought. I am this kind of person that can do that. And it does wonders for your identity, your self-esteem. And it's a happiness tool as well, but it gives you more energy, psychological energy, just I can do this.

• 1:10:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  I am this person.

• 1:10:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  So David, you've written about the five side effects of kindness, right? Which I think is a lovely, lovely idea, particularly with someone with a background in the pharmaceutical industry.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  I wanted to turn around side effect. Yeah, because well, a side effect isn't just a negative side effect of a drug. It's anything that happens alongside the thing that you're intending to do.

• 1:11:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I guess, you know, anything we do in life has a consequence. Any drug you take has a consequence that all affects. I guess if it's the effect we want, we call it the therapeutic effect. If it's the effect we don't want, it's a side effect, right? So I guess it's, it's, it's just how we phrase these things. But let's go into it. I think it's an interesting idea. So what are the five side effects of kindness?

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  So number one, kindness makes you happier. Number two, kindness is good for the heart. Number three, kindness slows aging. Number four, kindness improves relationships. And number five, kindness is contagious.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  There you go, five side effects of kindness.

• 1:11:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. And there's science behind all of that?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely, behind all of it. In fact, the happiness stuff has been well studied. Typically, what you do is you compare people intentionally doing acts of kindness versus people in a control group who are not doing, who are just behaving as normal. And you can track the happiness levels before and after. And you can do it a number of different ways. But in almost all of those studies, you see net gains in happiness, or people who do more kindness generally tend to be typically happier. So what you see is kindness actually improves happiness. Another thing it does is it reduces stress at the same time. The heart stuff is principally through the action of the kindness hormone, through being kind,

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  if it produces a sense of warmth and connection. What I did with that chapter is I just tracked the different physical effects in the heart and the cardiovascular system, and you know, even to do with inflammation and oxidative stress, as you practise kindness because of how it makes you feel. The slowing aging stuff is interesting because there's a number of processes of aging, a number of different ways that aging occurs. But one of them is something called oxidative stress, or free radicals. And one study I cited, when scientists were looking at the rate of oxidative stress in skin cells, and they found that if you introduced the kindness hormone to the skin cells put under stress, the levels of oxidative

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  stress were substantially less. And there's similar research looking at how the kindness hormone, I like to call it the kindness hormone, I love it, how it has quite a substantial bodywide effect on oxidative stress, which is one of the processes of aging, it's just one of a number.

• 1:13:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, kindness reducing the aging process, that is profound. And I love the fact that you call it the kindness hormone, oxytocin, which is also called the cuddle hormone, or the cuddle chemical.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  The hug drug.

• 1:13:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  The hug drug. But you know, it's, in many ways, it's all kind of pointing. To the same conclusion, which is when we are around other people who support us and we support them, when we're in our tribe, basically, we feel good. Our body changes, our genetic expression changes. We reduce things like inflammation and oxidative stress and immune dysfunction. These things, which actually, those three things probably drive most chronic diseases at their core. Inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction.

• 1:14:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we're saying that simply being around people we love, who are empathetic, who are kind, who are compassionate. It has profound impacts on all those things.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  It's incredible. I mean, it really, it really is incredible. In fact, can I suggest another aging study recently? Scientists were tracking a Tibetan Buddhist practice called the loving kindness meditation. You basically say, you think of people you care about in your life and other people, anyone in your life. And you say things like in your mind, may you be happy? May you be well? May you be safe? May you be at peace? Or something along, there's different versions, but so may you be happy? May you be well? May you be safe? May you be at peace? And it's repetition of that for yourself, loved ones, even difficult people, all life. And it's a repetition. And it's been known for a while that that generates a system-wide anti-inflammatory effect.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  It impacts part of the nervous system that controls something called the inflammatory reflex. So it basically improves what's called vagal tone, which is like muscle tone, but talking about a part of your nervous system that impacts on inflammation. And they found that practice caused a reduction in the inflammatory response to stress. But a recent study looked at the rate of biological aging by measuring the length of telomeres.

• 1:15:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  You know, so telomeres, you probably explained before, the aglet, little plastic shoelace caps called aglets. And the rate of loss of telomeres is proportional to the rate in which the person is aging at that time. And so. They compared a control group with a group doing mindfulness meditation with a group doing, may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be a piece of, or a version of the loving kindness meditation. And they found they measured the the length of loss of telomere after six weeks of normal, just no practice at all. And that's your baseline. And then they measured mindfulness meditation. They found a little slowing of the loss. But they found no measurable loss at all in that six week period of those who did the loving kindness.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  They may be happy, maybe. And and it seems to be that that a possible explanation is an anti inflammatory effect in the vicinity of the the telomeres, which you might think of as a decluttering of the environment around the DNA, which allows it to repair itself better.

• 1:16:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, it is just incredible. And it's, you know, puts a huge smile on my face hearing things like this because it's, it's just a nice thing to hear, right? It's it's great when the things that make us feel good as human beings also do good. For us, right? That's that's kind of win win all rounds. You said that kindness is contagious.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can you explain?

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Oh, no, this is actually what this is. I was going to say this is my favorite, but I've got so many favorites. I get carried away sometimes, but.

• 1:17:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  You sound like me. I'm the same. This is why this conversation could keep going on and on unless we start thinking about wrapping it at some point, but but fire away.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  So a study between Harvard and Yale, they they looked at, they did a clever little business game simulation. A lot of these studies are done in little simulations. You you create a game and what you're secretly measuring is kindness or cooperative behavior. And what they found is if you be kind to someone, then because of how that person feels, they call it elevation. That person feels either. Connected to you, or they feel uplifted, or they feel grateful, it doesn't really matter. It's a feeling, a changed feeling. That person will likely be kind or kinder to someone else because of how you made them feel. Now, that person now is at one social step from you, or one degree of separation.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  But that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how they were made to feel. And that's at two degrees of separation. But then that person will be kind or kinder to someone else at three degrees of separation or three social steps. But that isn't real practice because in reality, given the average amount of interconnectedness, amount of interactions that we have in any one day, you might well probably say that if you be kind to someone, if you were to follow them around, which hopefully you don't do, but we don't do, but if you were to follow a person around with a camera, you would probably find that the person you've just helped will be kind or kinder to five people over the course of the rest of the day because of how you made them feel, given the average amount of interconnection.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  But those five people will be kind or kinder to five more. And now we're at two social steps, 25 people. But each of those five people will be kind or kinder to five further people, which is 125 at three social steps. So you really have this ripple effect, just like you drop a pebble in a pond and the wave goes out in all directions. And a lily pad at the opposite side of the pond goes up and down. And it doesn't know why it's going up and down, but it's going up and down because of the wave. But the same is happening to lily pads at the other side of the pond, the wave goes out in all directions. So what this research shows is that kindness spreads out in all directions. So it's not just one person that you help, but it ripples out in all directions.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  And if you were to track it that way, you would probably find somewhere, given the average amount of social interaction most people have, you'd probably find around about 125 people, probably more, given a densely populated area, are benefiting from every single time you do, even say something nice, you pay a compliment, you help someone, you hold a door for someone. It sounds so, you know, preposterous, so simple. But I put it to the listeners that... If you ever feel small, if you ever feel that you don't contribute, you don't make a difference, you're doing it every single day, even with the little things that you don't think matter, but they matter to the person that you've helped, who will then spread it out by to three social steps.

• 1:20:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, David, I absolutely love things like this. It makes me think of in this, in this time where many of us feel powerless to make a change and we don't like the way society is heading, it reminds me of that phrase, I don't know if it's Gandhi, I can't remember who it is, be the change you want to see in the world. This is putting it right back in our own court, saying, hey, you know what, be kind to someone each day and that will ripple out. That is something we can all do. And, you know, we say it's for that other person, even if it doesn't make us feel good, but the reality is it does make us feel good. You know, compare the difference when you go into a coffee shop and order your coffee

• 1:21:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  and take it and go on with your day compared to when you actually take it. Say something nice to the person, to the barista. Hey, thanks so much, really appreciate that. Hey, you made me a great one yesterday, I hope this one's as good, you know, anyway, have a good day. Whatever it is, they've got a smile on their face. They, they have probably been sort of shocked out of the, maybe the tedium that they were feeling trying to make, you know, a hundred coffees in an hour. But you feel good as well and that does in your own life spreads to your, you know, to your other interactions. But it reminds me a bit of, what's something Andy Ramich said to me, I had him on, I think in November, he was, he set up this thing, this company, One Year No Beer.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it was a really fun podcast I had with him, actually, great conversation. And he, he was citing some of the research, I think it's from Nicholas Christakis that I'm familiar with, about the power of social networks and how even something like obesity can spread through social networks.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  It goes to three degrees of separation.

• 1:22:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. So the point is, everything you're sort of saying, and we've been discussing today, is about community, it's about strong human connections, it's about how you treat those people around you. Can ripple into so many more people. And I think that's a very inspiring and empowering message for all of us. No matter where we are in life or what we're trying to achieve.

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it really all comes down to, I've said this many times, it really all comes down to kind interactions.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  You know, what's the point in not being kind?

• 1:22:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  I mean, that sounds like a really silly thing to say, but I try to see the world that way. I try, I don't always succeed. I think we're only human, we're just trying to do the best we can. But I think if we make an effort to be a kind person, a decent person, it makes you feel better, it makes that person feel better, and it just strengthens social bonds. And then you think, you find that communities just seem to work a little bit better. People tend to work a little bit better, groups work a little bit better when we're making an effort to be kind.

• 1:23:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it diffuses situations, I've realised.

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:23:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you're really kind to someone, it's pretty hard for them to start, you know, getting angry and resentful at you. It's, it's, it really, we respond to the signals we're getting in the environment around us. Right, we respond, even things are going on physiologically, we don't even realise. And so I think the way you treat other people is, really gets reflected back on yourself so, so much. David, you say you spend a lot of time teaching these days. Who do you teach and what do people say at the end of some of your courses?

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  A very, a very mixture, mostly general public. Oftentimes, I mean, professional people, you know, NHS will come along to something. I've spoken to NHS a couple of times. I do corporate speaking, I talk to different companies. And the, what I tend to talk to them about is kindness is the opposite of stress. And here's why, and here's how, give a little tools. Conferences, workshops, I mean, last night I did a lecture in Glasgow on the mind body connection and just got, you know, a couple hundred people come along and I do like a 90 minutes. So I do quite a lot of that, 90 minutes, just giving a talk and try to make it entertaining. People there for 90 minutes, I've got to throw in a few jokes here and there. But, so I do a lot of that kind, so it's different kind of audiences, but it's really

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  people who have an interest in learning about the mind body connection or learning about how kindness is good for your health and can make a difference in the world.

• 1:24:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I guess I can see the value for adults. I can see the value for everyone, frankly. I can also really see value for children. If we instill this in our kids in society and they grow up knowing the importance of it, experiencing the importance of it, doing it and practising it regularly, you just can fast forward that five, 10 years into society, what then happens to society?

• 1:25:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, I guess in a couple of weeks, I'm actually giving a talk at my children's school.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Oh, lovely.

• 1:25:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  For Mental Health Week there. And it's going to be around the Feel Better in Five Plan, because I think that five minutes on your mind, five minutes on your body, five minutes on your heart each day. I think it's the perfect wellbeing plan for any one of us, but particularly for children.

• 1:25:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, in schools, you know, they want to, they want to introduce wellbeing into schools, but everything either costs too much or takes too long. You know, everything in that is, only takes five minutes and it's free. And I haven't started to think about it yet. I think the talk's been about 10 days, but I need to talk for about half an hour to kids and make it engaging for kids between the ages of six and 11. And obviously, I won't talk about all kinds of things with them, but I think kindness, there are a couple of kindness practices in the, in the plan. But certainly on the back of this conversation as well, I really feel that that might be a nice thing to talk about. Have you spoken about it much with kids?

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually about a dozen times I've gone into schools, usually kind of local, like, like one of my friends is a teacher in an autism specialist unit near Glasgow. And I've been into his school about four times, I think. And then I did one of the couple, one of the local schools in Dunblane, where I live, I did another couple of schools, my niece's school. And, but each time I've gone in, I did one at Mental Health Week, actually, for, at Mental Health Week for another school, kind of local. And usually the kids are, are about to start or in the, or they're in the middle of a kindness project, where the teachers have designed a little thing where they've to learn about kindness, they, they have to be.

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  Kind of to understand what kindness is. And so they've got little things up on the board, little pictures that they've drawn about what they've done. And so the whole project is to learn about what kindness is and how do you do it. But notice how it makes you feel and notice how it affects that other person's behaviour. And then depending on the age of the kid, understanding a little bit more about it. And so I tend to come in because it's just novel having someone else. And I bring in my books and I bring in all the international translations, like the Japanese version, the Romanian version, the French and the Italian version. And the kids just love having something to pass around while I talk about kindness, because they all want to know,

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  you'll find this yourself, they want to know about you as well. I mean, the first time I did it, open for questions, expecting a question about kindness, what age are you? Next question, what colour is your car? You know, but it's just, it's just so nice that the kids just want to know about you. They're being kind already because they want to know about you as well as about the kindness of the stuff. So I've really enjoyed doing it.

• 1:28:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, these are great tips and I'm already thinking about how to apply them. You know, some of those things, I always think you can learn from everyone you come into in contact with. There's always a learning there. And even that idea of giving stuff out where they're almost getting excited and wanting to engage with you. I find that interesting. I'll probably think about what I can do about that. Any particular stories you've heard from kids that they, or stories that you've said that they really resonate with?

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, about kindness. What I've found really inspiring is particularly when I went into one of the autism unit, because John, my friend John's been really pushing kindness. They've got me on the wall, actually, as Doctor Kindness.

• 1:28:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love it. Pushing kindness. Isn't that a lovely thing to be pushing in society? You're a kindness pusher.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's really lovely. You know, I feel part of the furniture when I've gone in. But every time I go in, when the kids see me come and someone goes and opens the door, and then they're telling me what they've done, what they've been doing. And you hear things like, well, I've held the door. One person really inspired me, she said, I decided when such and such a boy was not being very mean, I decided not to push him down. And that was a girl who was known for pushing people down. And it was such a beautiful thing that she stopped for a moment and decided to be kind and said, but she was totally aware that that's what she did. And I felt myself getting quite moved. But what you might think is a simple little, most people

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  wouldn't even notice it. But I know that she'd pushed people in the past and she decided to stop and understood that being kind is not responding in that way. And I thought that's just, it was, it really melted, actually.

• 1:29:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Did you make a point with kids of teaching them that, yes, it's a nice thing to do for that other person, but it's also good for you?

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I think that's going to be a message that resonates with the kids.

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:29:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And frankly, adults, because we're just big kids, right? That, you know, if you don't want to do it because it's good for other people, do it because it's good for yourself.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  I know. And actual fact that that's been a big part of all of the kindness projects that I've went into the school to talk during that kindness week, for example. A big part of it pushed by the, you know, pushed along by the staff is how it makes you feel. The importance of also being kind to yourself. I'm not trying to plug my books in, but Lady Gaga bought one of my books and she bought it for all of her staff and it was one of my kindness books. And her mum in our office reached that charity, Born This Way Foundation, reached out to me. And we had a few conversations, Cynthia, her mum Cynthia Jim and what, and I did a few wee, a couple of wee interviews. And I went over to the US, to New York last

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  year, and they'd invited me to participate in a kindness project. And one of the things Born This Way Foundation does is they go into schools and they help children to understand what kindness is. And so I went over there and what happened is the kids at this school in Long Island had, it was coming up to Christmas time, they'd used some of their own Christmas allowance to buy presents for the children of women staying in a temporary homeless shelter. So these kids wouldn't get presents otherwise. And all these kids at the school had used their own allowance, they said to their parents, you know, can we take some of my allowance and could I buy this fire truck for such, or this game of something for such and such?

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  And when I arrived, we arrived at the school, Cynthia and I and some of the team. The whole corridor was filled with hundreds of presents. Then the kids took the presents one at a time and they took them in and they filled an entire yellow school bus with all these presents. Then the presents were driven away. Now, part of the project was now what happens next. The kid, part of the project now was the kids had to learn and discuss maybe the write down or the debate, but they have to learn about the consequences of what they've done. The difference that that makes in the lives of these children who maybe wouldn't have got presents, who are the children of women and homeless shelters. But also to notice, how did you feel when you did that? And how did you feel when you learned that that makes a difference for them?

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  So the whole, so part of what they do is get involved in these kind of projects that are really taking it right into children's hearts and minds so that they understand not just academically what kindness is, but how does it make you feel and notice that? And I think that it makes a huge difference to the kind of person that you become because you start to notice this feels a lot better than arguing on Twitter, for example.

• 1:32:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I mean, I really like that, particularly the idea of noticing how you feel. So I know I mentioned that gratitude practice early on in the episode that I didn't go and expand upon, but let me just tell you what that, what that, what that game looks like because the podcast has got a lot of new listeners, a lot of people won't be familiar with it. But essentially for a number of years now, at our evening dinner in the Chastity households, my wife, myself and my two kids sit down, we have dinner. And at some point during dinner, we play this gratitude game where we all have to answer three questions. What have I done today to make somebody else happy? What has somebody else done to make me happy? And what have I learned today?

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:33:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, what's incredible is that it's changed the dynamic of our meal times. It's changed the energy. If people come in really stressed or rushing around, you know, suddenly the dynamic just changes. You start to connect, you start to find out things about your, your family members and your kids and your wife that you wouldn't otherwise have, have learnt if it wasn't in that setting.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what's really interesting is, you know, my kids are seven and nine now. So I'm guessing we started playing, I don't know, five and three or six and four, something like that. I can't quite remember now. But my kids have started to bring in their own. Questions. So there's now five questions in the game. We don't always play all five. It depends how tired and frustrated everyone is, but we definitely do at least three. But one of the questions that I can't remember if it was my son or my daughter who brought in was, I think it was my daughter actually, she said, she said, Daddy, why don't we add another question? So when you did something to make someone else happy, how did you feel?

• 1:34:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. So the fourth question is, it's going back to the first question and it came from my kids. How do you feel? And it just, just what you said there, noticing how you feel when you do an act of kindness. That's almost, and I think that's a really important part to sort of lock in that emotion.

• 1:34:47Speaker 00

  I like that lock it in.

• 1:34:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Lock in that feeling and just sort of luxuriate in that feeling. Oh, you know, I felt it made me feel good when I held the door open for my classmate. You know, whatever it is. And I think that's a, that's a really, really important component to anything in life, frankly, but particularly these sort of things.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  Do you know how, you know, that what you're doing for your children is altering the course of their life in a really positive way? I wish that I learned about kindness, the way what you're doing and the way that some schools are doing it. I wish our school had, for example, done a kindness project instead of us learning it later. I think what you're doing now for your kids will shape, positively shape the course of their life because it's conditioning, it's locking that feeling in and it's conditioning the quality of person, of people that they will become as they get older. And that will have an amazing impact on their health, but also in the quality of their relationships and what they end up doing in the world.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  And I, you know, it's such a beautiful thing to teach your kids about being kind, but locking in how it makes you feel. Cause then it becomes, I understand this because I feel it.

• 1:35:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 00

  I'm not just something you're saying, well, you do this, you do that. I get this because this is how I feel.

• 1:36:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not, it's not just something that Daddy told me to do.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  I feel it. I've locked it in. I feel it. I feel it here. Wow. Amazing. What a teaching for your children.

• 1:36:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. David, I really appreciate you saying that because I think like all parents, I'm just simply trying to do the best I can for them based upon. My knowledge and my experience. Well, David, look, I have absolutely loved chatting with you today. You've written a lot of books. If you were going to direct people, listen to this to one book to get going on their David Hamilton journey. What do you think is the best starting point for them?

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  Well, possibly the five side effects of kindness.

• 1:36:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Simply because you mentioned that, you know, that it's a good starting point, but also how your mind can heal your body is that one all about the mind body connection. I cover a few different subjects.

• 1:36:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Oh, we'll link to all the books in the show notes session. I'll also link to some really, really good blogs on David's website that are well worth reading. They're short, they won't take you long. So do check out the show notes. Page for this episode to sort of have access to those. David, this podcast is called Feel Better Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives.

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you're very clearly saying that when we're kinder to other people, when we're more compassionate to other people, we and they get more out of their lives. And my goal with this podcast is to inspire each and every listener to take action, to do something, not just hear all this great information. I go, hey, that's pretty cool. But actually turn that inspiration into action. So I wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your very top tips, things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Well, how about why I often find people enjoy is the seven day kindness challenge. And you've got to do an act of kindness every day for seven days, but there's three ground rules. The first one is you can't count the same thing twice. So for example, if you start on a Monday and you make someone a breakfast in bed or a cup of tea or something, you can do that again during the week, but it only counts the first time. So you can't count it the other day. So you've got to do seven different things. Another ground rule is at least once you've got to push yourself a little bit, push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. And the number three is at least one of those acts of kindness must be completely anonymous.

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  No one must ever know what you did, or if something was done, no one must ever know that it was you that did it. And that takes yourself or the need for recognition out of the equation. So that's the ground rule. So seven day kindness challenge, something different every day. Push yourself out of your comfort zone at least once and one thing has to be completely anonymous.

• 1:38:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Man, I, I literally love that so much.

• 1:39:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.

• 1:39:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/fridayfive. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks, which I am narrating.

• 1:40:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.