Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | 3 Surprising Health Habits We All Need To Know To Get Well and Stay Well | Dr Gemma Newman #535 About this episode Today’s guest is incredibly passionate about treating body, mind and spirit as one. She’s knowledgeable and articulate, but what I like the most is her warm-heartedness and her kindness.
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today's clip is from episode 420 of the podcast with Dr Gemma Newman, a family doctor, author and friend, passionate about combining holistic methods with conventional medical practice.
In our full conversation, Gemma introduced her GLOVES acronym which points to six key areas of life we can address if we want to get well and stay well.
In this clip, we explore the first 3 - they include simple daily habits and ways of thinking and being that can help us live a happier, healthier life. And in a world where ‘wellness’ often comes with a hefty price tag, her suggestions are all free.
Gemma’s book: Get Well Stay Well – The Six Healing Health Habits You Need To Know.
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Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/420
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 420 of the podcast with Dr Gemma Newman, a medical doctor who's passionate about combining holistic methods with conventional medical practice. In our full conversation, Gemma introduced her gloves acronym, which points to six key areas of life that we can address if we want to get well and stay well.
2:04 Rangan Chatterjee? In this clip, we explore the first three, which include simple daily habits and ways of thinking and being that can help us all live happier, healthier lives.
2:20 Rangan Chatterjee? The first three, gratitude, love and outsides. I think those are things that are not spoken about enough in relation to health. I don't think doctors speak or think about these things enough when it comes to health. And I'm delighted that you are, you know, highlighting the importance of these things.
2:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:40 Rangan Chatterjee? Let's start with gratitude. What happens in the brain when we express gratitude?
2:46 Speaker 01 Well, the part of our brain that's responsible for excess rumination, that tends to light up when we are in a negative cycle of thinking. The parts of our brain that light up when we're in a more sort of grateful state of thinking are also the ones that light up when we do other things like physical movement and we get a good sleep and things like that. So it's about igniting that part of our brain that allows us to be more present in the moment as well. And again, that's very hard to do if your brain is racing away into the future or worrying about things that have happened in the past or worrying about what's going to happen next. It's about allowing the brain to completely relax and allowing you to be completely present in the moment.
3:31 Speaker 01 And then that process then allows you to think more about, well, feeling gratitude.
3:37 Rangan Chatterjee? I think one of the ways many of us think about gratitude is to write down or to think about things that they're grateful for in their life. Right? You know, I'm grateful for the roof over my head. I'm grateful that I can afford to feed my family, whatever it might be. And you include that in your definition, but there's a bit more to it, isn't there? The way you describe it.
4:01 Speaker 01 So gratitude is a process whereby you recognize what you have learnt from the experiences in your life and you recognize moments of beauty that you can see and feel around you. At least that's how I would define it. And one of the things that strikes me when I see patients is that, as I mentioned before, life is hugely challenging. And there's many things that we don't have to feel grateful for or can't even imagine ourselves feeling grateful for.
4:42 Speaker 01 Tragedy is around the corner for all of us, and that sounds really quite a negative thing to say, but it's also true. I think the gamble of actually living a life fully means that we will have to experience tragedy too. And for me, it's about understanding what it is that we can learn from those moments and how we can actually bring a bit more light and a bit more self compassion to the times when we really struggle. And that's a way of helping the emotions that we feel to have validation,
5:26 Speaker 01 but also helping them to actually bring further meaning to our lives. Rather than, in a way, what we tend to do is externalize that emotion. So if something's gone wrong, or if we feel let down by somebody, it's actually quite hard for us to process, well, what is it that we've learnt about ourselves? And what can we feel grateful for? That doesn't come naturally, but it's one of the key ways in which we can actually learn something from what we go through and give to others. And yeah, it's not something that's really talked about a lot, but I think it's actually really crucial to getting and staying well physically and emotionally. And sometimes, you know, when people hear about gratitude practices, they think, oh, well, that's for the people who are rich or wealthy or don't have any problems in their life,
6:11 Speaker 01 or that's for the people that nothing's gone wrong for. But my perception is that it's for everybody. And when we can connect with ourselves with gratitude and self compassion, it means that we're far more likely to be able to connect with other people in that space as well. And from that space, we can then elevate ourselves and other people. So it's really a way of recognizing our shared humanity.
6:37 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. In the session on gratitude, you wrote about imagination and visualization. And right at the start of this conversation, when I asked you about one of the most common reasons, if not the most common reason, why people struggle to really make long lasting change in their lives.
7:00 Rangan Chatterjee? I think you mentioned that, that actually people cannot imagine themselves as a different person. They can't imagine what it would be like to be well, or be that different person, be that person who's calm and non-reactive. So tell me, what's so good about imagination, visualization, mental rehearsal? What does that do? And does that tie in to the answer that you gave me right at the start?
7:24 Speaker 01 Yes, it does, because visualization is a powerful way of helping you to imagine the better future that you currently cannot see. And if you allow space for visualization, it doesn't have to be a sort of a mumbo jumbo or a woo woo thing. It's literally opening up your mind to possibility. And what we tend to do day to day, our day to day habits, are the things that drive our thoughts and the things that then drive our actions, right? So if we can allow space for different habits, or different thoughts, or different actions, then the only way to really start to imagine that is through the power of visualization.
8:06 Speaker 01 And you don't have to do one thing first. You could do whatever resonates with you. So one person might find that actually, if I just change this one daily habit, that's going to maybe help me open my mind a little bit more. Whereas other people find it useful just to go all out on a potential visualization of what they could imagine their future being, or their future health circumstance being. And then that can allow them the ideas that come from changing their habits. So it doesn't have to be one way. But it does work. And there is some study evidence to suggest that it really can improve your, you know, your ability to imagine that better future. And then, and then obviously go ahead and do it. There was one study I read about, about muscle strength, which was fascinating.
8:50 Speaker 01 They got three groups of people, and one group were told to flex their muscles. As though they were doing it in real time, so as though they were seeing themselves flex their muscles in real time. I think it was fifteen minutes a day, five days a week. And another group were told that they had to see themselves from a distance as though they were watching a movie flexing their muscles for fifteen minutes, five times a week, I think it was. And then the final group had no visualization. And it was only in the group that were visualizing themselves flexing their muscles in real time that they actually saw an improvement in their muscle strength, even though none of the groups had actually moved a muscle.
9:31 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, there is quite a bit of research on this, the power of visualization. And what I often say to people who are skeptical is, I say, well, okay, let's just think about some of the best athletes on the planet.
9:43 Speaker 01 Exactly.
9:43 Rangan Chatterjee? Right?
9:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:44 Rangan Chatterjee? Most of them, or a lot of them, I should say, actively engage in visualization. And as you've also talked about in your book, there's not that much difference between what's imagined and what's real in the brain, right?
10:00 Speaker 01 The brain perceives it very similarly.
10:02 Rangan Chatterjee? Very similar. Ed Moses, one of the greatest hurdlers of all time, in every race is what he would do. He would be on the track, lying down next to one of the hurdles whilst his competitors are warming up. He's just lying there, motionless. And he is literally imagining the starter gun going off, how he's going to feel, what's going to happen. The wind through his body, he imagines the precise thirteen steps that he takes between every single hurdle. And he has said in many interviews that he only felt ready to race once he'd gone through that process.
10:42 Speaker 01 It's fascinating.
10:43 Rangan Chatterjee? It's very fascinating.
10:45 Speaker 01 The beauty of visualization is that it's free and available to everyone. And it doesn't have to be a sporting feat. It doesn't have to be something that changes the world. You could visualize yourself feeling just that little bit better than you do today and what that might look like for you and what that would involve in terms of your day to day routines, how they would play out slightly differently and what decisions you might make that day based on feeling just ever so slightly better than you do now.
11:12 Rangan Chatterjee? Let's skip L for the moment and go to O, which is outside. We'll get back to L because it's great. Why did you give an entire one of your six letters over to outside? And what do you mean by outside?
11:26 Speaker 01 We are part of nature and as humans, we're so good at separating ourselves from nature because we think we're above it, but we are it. So for me, it's integral to understanding how we can actually bring more health and vitality into our lives.
11:44 Rangan Chatterjee? There's many powerful case studies in the book, but there was a chap who essentially
11:50 Rangan Chatterjee? was close to burnout or was at burnout, but a little bit of nature helped to create. My interpretation of reading that case study was that it created a bit of space in his life. It gave him a bit of perspective, which allowed him to then go and make changes.
12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And I think for him, it was, he was one of these people who was working from home and he was always at the computer. And there was a lot of expectation that he would answer emails straight away and that he would be on for every meeting. And he was, he didn't have time, he felt, to go outside. He didn't have time to go anywhere. He was just basically at home in the office, constantly working. And he got to the point where he literally fell to his knees and started sobbing because he was completely overwhelmed. And so, you know, his wife said to him, go and see the doctor. Got to try and sort this out. And interestingly, there were just a few things that were required
12:48 Speaker 01 to help him feel less overwhelmed. Creating boundaries around his personal time was important. But also the power of nature, like you say, because a lot of people, you spend so many time, so much time on our screens, even just being able to look out into the distance for a little while actually shifts that, that visual focus and allows our parasympathetic nervous system to kick in a little bit more, gives us more of a sense of calm, even changing. It's literally a way of seeing the wood for the trees, being able to change your perspective from looking at something very close up with a monitor that's emitting a lot of blue light to being able To look out into the distance as far as you can into the horizon, just letting your eyes relax. It's actually a great way of allowing your parasympathetic nervous system a chance to kick in.
13:34 Speaker 01 And seeing scenes in nature also does that. There's some great studies actually on being able to relax your body and mind just by looking at images of nature. And there's some also great studies on people recovering from hospital stays. You know, where they had a room with a view to the outside, where you might be able to see a hospital courtyard, for example. They reported faster recovery times, less need for analgesia post operatively. It's amazing the impact it can have on our physical health and recovery, just being around nature. And there are so many different examples of that. I alluded to some of the studies done on so called forest bathing. I think there was a group of gentlemen walking in the forest, 90 minutes.
14:19 Speaker 01 Same 90 minutes in urban settings, but the forest settings, they were able to record lower blood pressure, lower pulse rate. You know, an ability to actually improve their physiology by walking in one place over another. We have some great evidence to suggest it really helps to reduce activity in the parts of the brain that's responsible for rumination. The sub general prefrontal cortex.
14:42 Rangan Chatterjee? Very good.
14:44 Speaker 01 Is less activated when we go out in nature. And I think that's fascinating because it shows us that not only can we have potential reductions in blood pressure, reductions in heart rate. But we can actually see the changes and the shifts in our own brains when we go outside.
15:00 Rangan Chatterjee? For that person who is living in an urban setting.
15:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:05 Rangan Chatterjee? What do you say to that person?
15:07 Speaker 01 Even if you can have a little pot of herbs in your kitchen, that might be quite a nice way of bringing nature in. And you can use those for cooking as well. House plants, fantastic.
15:17 Rangan Chatterjee? When we converted this into the studio for the podcast and put the plants in that I've taken real ownership of these plants. Like I, you know, I tend to them, I'll check on them regularly. I'll take him out into the garden on a nice day to get some air. And it's, I don't know, it's really connected me to even this podcasting space. And I know that sounds really out there, but.
15:43 Rangan Chatterjee? I don't know, it's really meant something to me to do that.
15:45 Speaker 01 Yes, it brings me great joy to see my houseplants flourishing.
15:50 Rangan Chatterjee? It's, you know, you mentioned purpose before and purpose can be this really great thing that we can stress out about, you know, what is my life purpose?
15:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:59 Rangan Chatterjee? Or it can be a real micro purpose, like, you know what, that's a living plant and it's my job to look after it. And that has value.
16:07 Speaker 01 A hundred percent it has value. Oh my goodness. Let me, let me share something with you. There's a parable that an Italian psychiatrist came up with and it's the parable of the three stonecutters. And they were building a cathedral in the 14th century. And the three stonecutters were asked about their jobs. And the first stonecutter replied bitterly that he would be cutting up big chunks of rock every single day for the rest of his life until he died. And that was his job. The second stonecutter, he said, I am thrilled to be a stonecutter because it means that every day I'm doing something that requires my skill and that allows me to earn money for my family
16:51 Speaker 01 and to create a beautiful home filled with love. The third stonecutter said, I am thrilled again to be a stonecutter because for me, what this means is that I am building a temple to the divine. I am building something that's going to outlive me and that will be a place of worship and prayer for generations to come. This place is going to stand for a thousand years. And I have been a part of that, which means that I will live on in this beautiful cathedral. And all three men doing exactly the same thing. And all three men had very different perspectives about what it was that that brought them.
17:29 Rangan Chatterjee? It's such a great story. It illustrates so much. I think the most powerful thing is that it's possible to reframe anything.
17:40 Speaker 01 Hmm. Yeah.
17:42 Rangan Chatterjee? That's honestly Gemma, hand on heart, the biggest change, the biggest realisation I've had in my entire life, I would say, is that everything's a story.
17:54 Speaker 01 Hmm.
17:54 Rangan Chatterjee? Everything. And we have the autonomy to create better stories. Once we realise that it is a story. Now, just to be clear, I am not denying that really awful things happen. I get that.
18:17 Rangan Chatterjee? But it is the story that we put on top of that event that ultimately determines its long term impact on us.
18:27 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:27 Rangan Chatterjee? It really does.
18:29 Speaker 01 And the interesting thing about the stories we tell ourselves is that when we when we feel awe and when we feel inspired by somebody else, more often than not, that feeling comes from where they have actually managed to inspire us through their suffering. Because that feeling of awe is something that we can get internally or externally. It can come from looking at an incredible sunset, or it could be when you're in a big stadium, listening to music that you love, pumping and everybody's dancing, that you could feel a sense of awe externally, or you could feel it internally when you imagine
19:10 Speaker 01 or remember how it feels to look at your newborn baby's palm, or how it feels to have been there for someone that you love who was going through bereavement or miscarriage or whatever it is. That sense of awe towards somebody else almost invariably happens when they've actually been through something and when they've inspired you through that thing.
19:34 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
19:35 Speaker 01 And that's so powerful.
19:38 Rangan Chatterjee? Can you think of an example in your own life when you experienced awe and that it then inspired you?
19:48 Speaker 01 I think there are so many different people who I've felt inspired by. And the first is my mother because she had me when she was very young. She was nineteen, just turned nineteen. And she was on her own. And it's very hard to be a single parent. It's very hard to raise someone with love when you don't have any resources. But she did.
20:27 Speaker 01 And I think back at what it must have been like for her as a teenager, not knowing where to turn, not having any support, not having anyone to look after this little thing and have to every day show up with love. I get quite emotional thinking about it because she did that for me and she loved me. And I know how important it is even just to have one single caregiver in your life that showed you love, how amazing that is for our brain development. You know, babies, there's about between seven hundred and a thousand synaptic connections happening a second in that first year of life.
21:09 Speaker 01 And love is the biggest key to that synaptic development in babies. And I had that from her. And I just, that fills me with immense awe.
21:19 Rangan Chatterjee? Well, thank you for sharing that, just hearing that. And then you think about what parents all over the world in all different kinds of challenging situations are doing for their kids. If people are struggling and they forget how much they've done, just any parent out there, just remember what you've done for your kids.
21:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
21:41 Rangan Chatterjee? That's pretty incredible.
21:43 Speaker 01 It is, it's incredible.
21:45 Rangan Chatterjee? Even if you think your life is horrible and you're struggling and there's bills to pay and there may well be, in terms of your gloves acronym, the G of gratitude, we can look at us as parents, most of us and go, yeah, you know what? I'm doing an all right job with my kids. You know, I'm still showing them love.
22:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:05 Rangan Chatterjee? That's gratitude, right?
22:06 Speaker 01 Exactly, that is gratitude, that is it. And it's very powerful.
22:11 Rangan Chatterjee? Love is the second letter in gloves. There's a whole chapter, a beautiful chapter that you've written about love. What is love?
22:21 Speaker 01 For me, it fundamentally is an awareness of our connectivity and an awareness of how we can all make a difference to the lives of other people, but we just don't necessarily always realise that. So in the love chapter, I talk about self-love as a way of improving our health, that's self-compassion, but also about how in giving love to others, we also elevate their health. Because we're all, I do believe we're all healers of ourselves and of each other. And I feel so emotional for some reason.
23:00 Speaker 01 I feel like this is, I feel this is the real core of my mission in life is because, you know, we're all healers, we just don't realise it. I chose a career in medicine because I wanted to help people, yes. But we all heal each other through the stories we tell ourselves and each other and through compassion for ourselves and each other. And that's why love is so important, is because it is the root of, I believe, a lot of our healing.
23:29 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
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