The Nature of Being Alone

Can nature help us to feel less alone? 💌Join 9,000+ people getting our takeaways and favourite moments from this episode in our weekly newsletter - https://www.theimperfects.com.au/sign-up-to-our-newsletter/ Psychologist on the incredible, Alone Australia series (remember our seminal episode with Gina Chick?), Mark Mathieson is in the Academy of Imperfection to help us understand how nature regulates our body, and how we can reconnect to it in this digital age. Mark talks about how to uncover the person behind the persona, the science behind gardening, and why Hugh had the best sleep of his life in a tent, with no pillow. According to Mark, human are immensely capable of change, and this episode provides a few things we can do to ensure nature is incorporated into our routines, without cramming the schedule more. Mark, it was great to be alone . . . with you. If you’d like to watch this full episode on YouTube, follow this link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMSSRJg2vQ 0:00 – Ice breaker: where have we gone wrong?6:58 – The segmentation of exercise11:46 – Evolution of Mark18:53 – Person behind the persona24:10 – Our virtual reality future27:22 – Let’s learn to adapt36:00 – Building relationships with nature42:28 – The science of gardening and sunshine48:53 – Eventually, reality TV gets us all53:08 – Big city blues 🫖Imperfects episodes mentioned on this episode Gina Chick - Don’t Fight Life - https://bit.ly/4xj0kga Sean Turnell - A Prisoner’s Guide to Life - https://bit.ly/4btNKCu Sex for Normal People with Ita O’Brien - https://bit.ly/4btNNya Dr Emily - The (pesky) Hedonistic Treadmill - https://bit.ly/4yXxx2B Dr Paul Callaghan - How To Follow The Dreaming Path - https://bit.ly/457l9PY 📚Things to read Comfort Crisis, by Michael Easter - https://bit.ly/4pV10Ga The Dreaming Path, by Dr Paul Callaghan and Uncle Paul Gordon - https://bit.ly/4gctqrZ 📺 Things to watch Alone Australia (new season out now) - https://bit.ly/4yWVW8n 🩷To host your own Vulnerabilitea House, purchase here - theimperfects.com.au/shop 🩵To purchase our journal (or your novel) My Imperfect Life, click here - theimperfects.com.au/shop 🩵To join our subscriber community, A Little More Imperfects, follow this link - patreon.com/theimperfects 🩷 AND you can subscribe to A Little More Imperfects through Apple Podcasts http://apple.co/theimperfects All views expressed in this podcast are Mark Mathieson’s and not representative of the Department of Defence, Australia. The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment. The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you’re struggling, please see a healthcare professional, or call lifeline on 13 11 14. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're all alone in the middle of nowhere.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Who are you going to call?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Uh, my mum?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  No, Mark Mathieson.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I think the one thing I've learnt about humans is that we are immensely capable of change.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Gina chick psychologist while on alone.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  I definitely underestimated the impact loneliness would have on me.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Mark was there for Gina and now he's there for us. If hypothetically you could go back in time and you could change one mistake in your eyes that humans made, is there one thing that you would go back and change?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Definitely up there with the top things for my own mental health and when I've been struggling has been gardening. Why does that feel so good?

• 0:48Speaker 03

  You've been thinking about this question for decades. Where do you think we have gone wrong?

• 0:58Speaker 00

  What? A cliffhanger in a trailer? Come on!

• 1:06Speaker 03

  I would like to jump straight into it, say with a really big question for you. So according to the World Health Organisation, we...

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Yes, the peak medical body in the world.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  So currently globally, there are 1 billion people with some form of mental disorder. So 1 in 7 people globally. They believe there are approximately 720,000 suicides a year globally. You've been thinking about this question for the last, for decades. Where do you think we have gone wrong?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Nothing like a tough question to kick things off. No pressure?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  A little icebreaker?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  So this podcast is going to go for hell?

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Mark, have fun with it, you know?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Um, great, look, great question. And I think, yeah, you're right. I think I don't know if I have the exact answer. Um, you know, like many people, I think I'm grappling with it myself in my own life as well as, you know, trying to grapple with it professionally. But for me, I think the journey that I've been on, it's led me to a couple of sort of fundamental truths. And one is that, um, you know, we've kind of disconnected psychologically, socially, culturally from, you know, the biosphere, if you want to call it that, the ecological support system of the planet, which has kept, you know, humans alive for nearly 2 million years. So headed off on a trajectory which I think for all intents and purposes is meant to be good for us and comfortable and safe. And it no doubt is in many ways.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  But we've kind of missed something in doing that. You know, we've headed off on that trajectory,

• 2:43Speaker 01

  kind of almost despite where the rest of the planet in the ecosystem is going. And I think it's that disconnection which for me is, is part of the foundational kind of rationale for why I think we're now seeing, you know, higher levels of pathology and, you know, rates of suicide and other things. So I think what perhaps modern science has got wrong, if I was to be critical of anything, is to say that, well, the problem resides entirely within us. And there's certainly truth in that, of course, you know, many of the modern treatments are great at dealing with some of those interpersonal issues. But, um, you know, we haven't really broadened the lens to say, well, what else is going on? Why are we in this position?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  So a disconnection from nature is sort of, is that what you're saying?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Well, from the patterns and cycles in nature which have sustained us for, you know, certainly in our current form for 170,000 years.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  You know, so we're living more time indoors, we're, you know, running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill, um, taking more and more, you know, supplements and interventions that are meant to try and put Band-Aids on things and head us back, you know, more approaches to therapy, more psychologists than ever before, more psychiatrists than before.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  When you say, and I think I know what the hedonic treadmill is, and I always sort of know, and I always kind of forget, can you just give a quick explanation of what that is?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So that treadmill is that process of just, um, you know, ticking all the boxes that we have to do on a daily checklist. Check our phones, check our emails, get a cab to work, you know, um, turn the air conditioner on, uh, and, um, you know, to some degree, keeping up with the Joneses, you know, pay a mortgage, buying the right car, wearing the right clothes. Um, nothing wrong with any of those things, but they've become so overwhelming, I think, that for many of us now, we've kind of probably gone even past capacity, you know, from a purely biological perspective. Um, we're just kind of asking ourselves to do way too much. And we talk about burnout, mental health as symptoms of that really.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  I thought the hedonic, when you said it, I thought it was that treadmill that's curved, that's not power.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Parametric.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, parametric. Yeah. I'm glad we clarified, John.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  What you're, what you're saying there reminds me of a friend of mine, a really good friend who lives in London and has been, I would say thriving for most of his life. And recently I learnt that he's not doing too well.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  And we were talking on the phone and he was describing a few things and he was, he went and saw a doctor and was medicated a lot quicker than I would have. I was so shocked at how quickly they said, here's some meds to get rid of that.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  But when he was telling me everything that was going on, it felt from an outsider looking in, it's like, you've lived in a hectic city for 10 years and you don't really like your job. It feels pretty obvious what's going on here. But we're hearing all the things he was doing is like, I'm doing cold plunging, I'm meditating, I'm keeping fit, I'm watching what I ate.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  I'm now on these meds, but nothing seems to be working. And it kind of felt like, isn't this obvious?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. And, and it is obvious when you have that sort of, you know, overarching ability to step back and see, see what's going on, which I think, you know, I've been really fortunate to do in my career, working with a whole bunch of really unique and special people in quotation marks. You know, the job of a psychologist is to kind of be that arbitrator of, well, what's normal, you know? And so there are many contexts where we sort of accelerate or support a way of being in the world, you know, living in a big city,

• 6:21Speaker 01

  which are, you know, sort of promulgated and suggested as a good way to live. You know, they're comfortable life. You've got all the basic needs that you supposedly require, apart from, you know, sanity and time to kind of breathe and be a normal human being. So I think we, I actually, you know, personally, maybe not so much professionally have evidence for, but personally, I think we've kind of over-evolved, you know, through modern life. You know, we're now doing things that biologically, psychologically, socially, we were never designed, you know, if you want to talk about humans as being ecologically designed to do.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  So a lot of what you've started to talk about, and I think we're going to go into today, I think you define as human systems ecology.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Maybe it would be good for us to get a bit of a sort of definition of that and how it kind of differs to a lot of sort of traditional Western psychology.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So I think...

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Or compliments perhaps.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, absolutely. Probably just broadens, I think is the word I would use. So, I mean, traditional psychology obviously studies, you know, what's going on in terms of, you know, people's behaviour and thoughts. So it's sort of interpersonal, interpersonal. Whereas what I think I've sort of been really fortunate to do over the last sort of 20 years is see people in all sorts of extremes and from that be able to see some, some bigger systems, you know, ways that, it's not just the individual, but it's their, their social setting, their cultural setting, also their biology in terms of where they are, you know, geographically and sunlight and, um, all those sorts of triggers that are specific to where you are on the planet. So human systems ecology really just views humans as part of a broader

• 7:56Speaker 01

  living system. So you can't really use that reductionist Western science of just trying to pull apart thoughts or pull apart behaviours inside the individual, saying, well, what environmental variables are also playing a part in that broader view of what's going on for that person? So is that a cultural issue? Is it a geographic issue in terms of sunlight or nutrition or temperature, uh, in as much as it's just what's going on inside their head?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  So it's always trying to look at that broad lens and then understand that unique individual's behaviour within the much broader lens of the systems they live in.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Is there a kind of a weird like comfort, even though, because I feel like I know so well, that, and this morning's a really good example. So this morning, like my morning routine is like, I'll get up and I'll go into like my, the spare room where there's a Peloton bike, exercise bike, and I do stretches and I, it's in like a little room though.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  But my partner Jam, she's, she hates the gym. She loves going out, loves being outside and is always saying to me, can't we just go for a walk outside in the morning instead of my, instead of just being in the gym, which I'm trying to kind of convince her to do, but she just hates doing it.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  And even though I know that a walk outside will be, would be a really nice change up, there's a weird comfort that there is in the routine. So is there, is there a sort of psychological thing going on with us that even though we know these regular things that we're doing indoors that aren't necessarily healthy for us, there's still, we know we shouldn't be doing it, but there's a comfort to it all the same?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's a great book, Comfort Crisis. If you haven't read that, I recommend it. It's a good, good sort of overarching snapshot of how we've, you know, evolved a lot of these practices that are meant to support us and they do, but they're, you know, what I would call they're dualistic. So we split things off, you know, I've got to have my exercise time or my mindfulness time or my alone time, you know, my solitude. I've got to go and have reading time. And they end up just being more things to tick off the list every day. Um, and so, you know, introducing new things, like going for a walk outside rather than inside, just seems like it adds to the burden, you know, got to deal with weather now and...

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Change my clothes. Um, whereas again, if we, you know, maybe look back even 200 years, most people were exercising incidentally, as in you were just working outdoors, you know, we didn't call it exercise, it was just work. And it's, I think it's the slow sort of insidious creep of those things where we've split things off into individual tasks. So I would say, well, it's not the being outside that's probably the issue, it's, you know, change and having to cope with something new. Um, it's also the fact that you've now segmented exercise off to be a special thing that you have to do, you know, you've invested time and effort and probably money in building the room and buying the bike. So you don't want to give that away. It seems like you're going backwards. Um, and so we end up with

• 11:00Speaker 01

  just more stuff. We all do it, you know? Um, you know, I've got a gym at home. So even though I live on a 130 acre farm where, you know, chopping firewood is easily a task that I could do most days endlessly, you know, there is some, um, mental sanctuary in going into the gym and kind of closing the door and...

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Doing your kind of zen-like activity, which is, it's okay. Um, but I've got the time to do that, you know, work from home. So I can segment that when the kids are at school, whereas most people don't, you know, they're trying to back to back to back to back with these activities.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Hi, it's Ryan from The Imperfects and I'm reaching out to you now because we need your help, gosh darn it.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  What, why do we need?

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Sorry, no, we're, I'm just making a plea to the listeners and viewers to ask them to subscribe to the show in whichever way they see fit, because it really helps. The more subscribers, the better we can make this show, am I right?

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I don't think we need to, I think we could just ask them politely.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if I use the emotional music.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  I think the music's a bit much.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Is it?

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Who's playing that music?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter who's playing the music. The important thing is we're pulling at the heartstrings and asking them to do us a solid.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  Could we not just ask, like, just ask them straight? Like, it'd really help us if you guys subscribed, because we would be able to make more of the show and make the show better.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Oh, and not use emotional manipulation?

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I reckon.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Well, we can give it a go, but I doubt it'll work. It's really interesting what you're saying, because I feel like as a show, we've done lots of stuff on how we can work on ourselves. And it sounds like, from what I'm hearing you say, it sounds like that's all really good.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  That's great, and it's really important, helpful stuff. But there's a whole part of it that's missing, which is the world around us, community, the systems, the environment. Where can, I wonder if you could take me back to sort of your own personal career?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  And where the sort of seeds of this within your own journey that this sort of started?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Look, I started out as a, as an athlete. So when I was a teenager, I was into trail running. Oh, well, you used to be just cross-country in those days, before it became trendy. So at that end, and then got into the sort of triathlon in the, you know, mid to late eighties, when it was a bit of a cool thing, still is, but got to have a lot more money these days.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Trevor Hendy era?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yes, Trevor Hendy and, you know, the Kana was first, the Hawaiian Ironman was first sort of around, so, you know, Dave Scott and.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Did you eat Nutri Grain?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  No, strangely, or probably did as a kid.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Wheat Bix, I think.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  That'll do.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Wheat Bix kid.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Nutri Grain's very important. I mean, I ate it, never became a triathlete.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Strangely, strangely. So I was, was interested in sport and, and performance. And then from there, I think I did what most kids did in the eighties, which was, you know, you finished high school and you went to uni if you, if you could. And so I thought, well, what am I going to study? I'm interested in sport. I could either do physiotherapy, or they did a documentary, and I can't remember which channel it was on, some doco was on, and they interviewed a guy called Jeff Bond, who was a sports psychologist at the Australian Institute of Sport. And I thought, oh, that'd be pretty cool, working as a psychologist as well. So I think I put physiotherapy down on my, you know, university choices. And I can't remember if I put it first, or whether I spelt it wrong and put psychology. Psychology, physiotherapy, I don't know. There's a Y and a P and an H in there somewhere.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Anyway, got into, got into psychology. And so I studied sports psych at uni. And kind of figured out as part of that, probably too late, it's actually really hard to make a living in sports psychology in Australia, because most athletes are broke. So I thought, well, what am I going to do with this qualification? So I'd always had an interest in the military and thought, well, you know, surely they are interested in performance as well. Maybe I could do sort of some sort of performance psychology in the military. So I joined the army and served in Australian Army Psychology Corps. And yeah, thirty, nearly thirty years later, I'm still, still serving.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And I'm only in the reserves now. But yeah, so I went off on a career of saying, well, how do I apply this, you know, this master's level sports psychology career to, to military personnel?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Took me about four years of service to get into special forces. And then I spent eight years from about 2004 through about 2011, 12, working in special operations command, working with special people. So selecting them, helping prepare and train them for deployment. Obviously, the military was really busy at that period of time. So we'd just gone in back into the Middle East in about 2003.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  So you're, you're part of the selection committee, basically, on who gets through that rigorous?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Like entrance, what would you call it, exam? Like test?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Torture, no.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So most of the, well, it's two, two sort of special forces organisations in Australia. The commandos are over on the East Coast and the SAS regiment are over on the West Coast. And they both run, or used to run, their own separate selection courses. So commandos was four weeks and the regiment was three weeks.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And we, yeah, there's a pretty heavy sort of psych work up for that to make sure that we're choosing the right sort of people. But then obviously that is then put to the test in the, in the context of the selection course itself. So we're looking for core characters, you know, core characteristics that will, we know are sort of signs of success in, in special operations.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  After doing it for a while, did you, did you come to sort of like, recognise certain traits as soon as you meet someone? That you go like, oh, I can tell you're gonna, you've got what it takes?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Not necessarily, because the, the selection course itself is designed, most of us have a social persona, right? So you come into a room, you meet somebody, you've got your game face on initially until you kind of relax and get to know people. And so of course, they know that they're going through a selection course.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Of course, they've got their game face on. And for them, you know, for, for special forces personnel, it's a, it's a, you know, critical sort of transition into a new career and higher pay and prestige. So they've got the game face on. So we do a battery of psych tests, some interviews. But then really the rubber hits the road when they get on the course. So we spend, in most cases, we'd spend the first third of the course, just, maybe not wearing them down is the right word, but, but sandpapering off that sort of social.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  The persona.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  The persona that they're portraying, getting down to brass tacks to real, raw character. And we do that through fatigue, exercise, constant tasks, constant challenges, mental and physical. And we used to give them puzzle books, you know, that are thick, you know, inch thick puzzle books that have just got mazes and sums that, and basically let them sit there for three hours and fill in the puzzle books for no reason. We weren't scoring it. It was just like, we just want to bore you senseless, so that we can actually get you to a point of frustration with those processes. Mind you, we'd be doing this at two o'clock in the morning and wake you up, let's go into a puzzle book.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  So that's not what I expected torture to be like, but I've done that.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  But you've got high achieving people that are driven to succeed. So, so, you know, they are very assiduous at doing the puzzle books and, you know, looking for approval. And we run these courses mostly in what we call silent running, a bit like a loan, which we'll, we'll come back to. You know, there's no external feedback, no external positive or negative validation of how they're going. So that's.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  They're just complete tasks with nothing, no feedback.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Correct, yep. Endless tasks with no feedback. So that the whole concept is to get rid of that social persona. So we don't care about that. We just want to know what you're like when it's just you and your head.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Do they know that's what you're looking for?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Mostly, yeah. It's, it's a bit like saying, you know, when people go on a loan, they know what being alone's like. Most people have a concept of what it's like, but until you're there and you're tired and you haven't slept well in three days and you've, you know, calorie deprived and.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  You're with a group of people that you don't really know or like, or, you know, it's, um.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  It reveals things.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  It reveals things, absolutely, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Just to fill in the blanks for people who've never seen alone, it's basically people volunteer themselves to go out, dropped in the middle of nowhere, basically. And it's out of the, they're all put in different spots. And then whichever one can essentially last the longest alone in the wilderness wins.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  And that could be 20 days, but it could be 100 days, depending on, and they don't know how the other ones are going.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  No, no feedback whatsoever.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, I mean, the, the military stuff is so, I mean, that testing is so fascinating, because I've often thought about the idea that we're all just walking around with this persona, like there's, we're playing a character unconsciously. And it's almost very, very rare that we drop that character. Like, I think even when we're by ourselves.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  We're conscious of who we want to be or who we're, you know, the things we're trying to do. And it's like, I mean, I, I did a project years ago, which was, I was writing a show, which was sort of about this theme. And I remember trying to think about the times where I was truly myself, and I didn't have the, the persona up. And I, and I struggled to think of a time.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  That I'm truly myself. That's a strange thing.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Oh, look, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the theories we have about personality is that it's, it's socially reflected. What I mean by that is, you might think of yourself as funny, but you only know that you're funny because other people reflect, they laugh when you crack a joke, right? So without that reflection, you wouldn't know what, well, if you just cracked a joke in an empty room, well, nobody laughed. So is it funny? I don't know. I don't know if I'm a funny person or not. If it's, is it a funny joke? So you, you need that social aspect of, of feedback to actually inform and construct your personality. We, we know, for example, if, when you raise kids, you know, kids will often smile performatively. In other words, as they're getting older, they figure out that if they smile at their

• 20:57Speaker 01

  parents, they're more likely to get something. Right? So, so, you know, kids learn to smile that, not because they're necessarily happy, it's because, oh, this is quite functional. Not thinking that cognitively, it's a socialisation process. So a lot of our personality, the way we think about ourselves is socially constructed and it evolves over time. And the reason we kind of know that is through some of the debriefs for people that have been put in, you know, solitary confinement. So part of the training we do in special forces is to teach people and prepare people for, you know, potentially being taken captive as a prison of war. And so we talk to them about how, you know, what, what do we know about what happens to somebody's psychology or their personality when they're in long periods, I'm talking

• 21:41Speaker 01

  years of socially socially sort of isolated. And, and one of the things we do know is that for many people, their, their personality kind of dissolves, you know, they start to actually question, well, who, who am I? Cause they don't have any of that social feedback.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  You know, unless they can build, I mean, so we train them in a build a relationship with your guards. It doesn't matter how miniscule or meek it is, you know, try and get them talking about anything.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Oh, that's part of the training.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Teaching people to leverage off, you know, learn the patterns and routines of the guards, try and work out their personalities, try and work out, you know, when it's daytime and nighttime. So keep yourself occupied and socially engaged if you can, just to keep yourself grounded.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Because the fear is you will lose your personality.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'll dissolve. So we know people, you know, can, can obviously suffer some pretty significant trauma in those sort of spaces. But part of it is because you just don't have the social connection. We're social mammals, you know, we, we live and breathe through social connections. Part of the connections that we talk about, I talked about earlier in terms of the disconnection we have now is, is loneliness, you know, people are incredibly lonely, even though we're more digitally connected than ever.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  So yeah, coming back to, to the sort of training, it's, it's a case of saying, well, you know, you needed to construct ways to try and keep building some sort of social reflection. Otherwise, yeah, you might just go be crazy.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  But that's a really, I've never heard on, I don't think we've ever spoken about that. I've never heard that the, cause we, we bloody bang on about social connection all the time and how important it is. But I've never, I don't think heard that the post, that the, the risk of no social connection, like the other end, the extreme end of the spectrum, is that you almost forget who you are because you haven't got the feedback.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is terrifying.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. It does make me think of the episode we do with Sean Turnell, who was captured in solitary confinement for, I can't remember how long, but it was a long years, I think, in Myanmar. And some of the things that he talked about in that episode, which is well worth listening to, is how he did talk to the guards a lot and made friends with the guards. And he also did an activity of recreating, using his memory to recreate social in, events from his life and almost in a granular detail.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  It's really interesting hearing what he did. He wasn't trained to, but kind of instinctively did. And, and you meet the person that came out and I feel like that must have saved him.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Um, and look, the reality for most of us is, you know, how often do we spend any time alone? You know, so most people, even if they say, oh, no, I, you know, went and stayed in a retreat or did the Pasana or something like that, you know, you still have other people around you and we forget that, uh, social connection is more than just speaking and it's, you know, smiles and small interactions and waves and, uh, that there's still enough, e- even having your phone turned on, even if you don't use it, is enough of a psychological link to go, oh, but I could talk to somebody.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  What about, cause like, cause it makes me think about the sort of apocalyptic future that we sometimes get shown in films where it's like everyone's, you know, on a chair with virtual reality glasses on in their homes.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  And interacting with the world that way, with like an avatar in like a virtual world. But, you know, there is a certain reality to that even today where a lot of people are, um, bound to their house and for whatever reason that might be. Um, but obviously online connections have become a, a save, a savior for a lot of people. Can you get the same connection through online interactions?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Oh, look, the research seems to think that you can get a proxy, a pretty good proxy for that. Um, again, I think it's, uh, probably the poor cousin of genuine connection in many ways. There's a whole lot of things, uh, around, um, I guess both psychological and, and biological connection, which we don't really have a complete handle on. We tend to separate them out. So for example, and it's going to sound a little woo woo, but we know that, you know, we are energetic beings, right? We run on electricity biologically, but we also have a magnetic field around us. You know, if you're somebody walks up behind you and stands right behind you.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Most of us sort of get a sense that, you know, very rare that people don't know that anyone's standing right behind you. It might be that they're breathing on the back of your neck or something, but you get a sense that they're there.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  There's a presence there.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a presence. Or if you're in a room, you walk into a dark room, you tell me, you know, sometimes you get a vibe, you know, it's like there's somebody here.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  So all of that stuff, even though it sounds a bit woo woo, we, we don't really have a handle on. So when we talk about connection, we often just think we're talking about language and talking. But we're also then discrediting all these other things. So digitally, obviously you can't do that. Um, so we're kind of coming back to that conversation we had initially about disconnection. Um, you know, is it just the fact that you're not in a room with somebody? Or is there some other stuff going on, some other patterns of nature and, and sort of some of the ecosystems we evolved to be in, um, that we've kind of discredited or said, oh, that's not really important, but maybe it is, maybe it is.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I imagine as well, and then maybe this is part of the training for, um, military when they're in solitary confinement. But I guess one of the other things that goes away is, is just touching another person.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Like the physical connection. Um, because we, we spoke to a, an intimacy coordinator actually recently for film and television, Ada O'Brien. And she was talking about like the importance of touch and like how, so how does that play in even in like a non-romantic sense?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Oh, huge. Well, I think I walked in and shook all your hands, didn't I?

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we know, you know, so the simple act of touching somebody means I'm, you're all now much more likely to help me out. If I drop my folder on the ground, it's, you know, statistically more likely to help me pick my stuff up just because I shook your hand. Cause we've actually.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Built a little tiny connection over and above what we would do on a digital platform.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  So, you know, we, um, there's all sorts of those little things, again, that, that we just assume, um, that probably doesn't play an important role overall. But when you then start stacking all these things on top of one another, you know, that sense of some sort of energetic field, physical touch, being in the same room, being able to make eye contact with people, even smell, you know, smelling what somebody smells like. I know it sounds a bit weird, but you know, um, we are programmed to do all of those things far more than we give credit to. We live way too much in the cognitive realm and forget that, uh, you know, we're animals too. We do all the same things that dogs do and everything else. We've just sort of suppressed all those senses.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Can I go back to the, um, assessment and selection part of the military with all the training and all the, all the selection criteria? What is, what is the most common characteristic you see amongst resilient people?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Hughes planning his application.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Well, there's a couple, but, but I think the primary one is probably, um, being able to see the patterns, being able to read those patterns in, in the environment and, and adapt to, to see those patterns and adapt to them.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  And is that like a broad statement around life or just like on that?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Uh, well, in all the groups that I've worked with, you know, people who can read the patterns in the environment that they're hoping to be to get into or, or are in, um, if they can see the patterns, ecological, human, social, psychological, and then they can adapt and apply skill sets. That's when those two things line up and they end up with what we would call resilience, but it's really just exceptional performance and ability to adapt to that space. So we get a lot of special forces, people, for example, who can take those skills from special forces and apply it to the business world. So they can read the strategy, understand the, what we call in the military, the human terrain, what's going on, who's, who's who in the zoo? How do I, um, help lead, shape, get to my end outcome? And then they apply that skill set. Um, it's often people who, who don't make the transition really well, who either don't know themselves, or they can't

• 29:25Speaker 01

  read the air internal patterns and like, or they can't read the external patterns very well. And so they come back and it's very jarring. It's like, hang on, this does not compute anymore.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I can think of a few people in my life who are really good at that in a social environment. And you, they're the sort of people who you think, I can invite them to any event.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  And they'll just find, they'll find a way to relate to whoever they're with. And it's not even that performative. It's just natural to them.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  It's ironic because what one of the, one of the selection activities we do on the, on the, certainly on the SAS selection course for, for officers, is we pluck them out. So they're in the field, they're dirty, they're grotty, they're filthy, they've been smashed physically, they've done all these puzzle books and other crazy tasks. And then we take them out and we put them in, um, a, a dinner party scenario.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Still dressed in their filthy gear. And we have all these, you know, extras, which are dressed in bow ties and civilians and there's canap, canapes and, and suddenly they've got to perform.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Socially.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Where's that show?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  It's a great, make a great show. But, um, yeah, so they, they plucked out of that. It's nine o'clock at night. They just think they're going to do another military activity, you know, strip and assemble a weapon or give a set of orders. And it's like, now you're in a embassy, you know, cocktail party. Go, carry on. You can see the discombob.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's kind of like, thank God you're here.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  I, I really want, I'd, I really wanted to ask you about, cause you've sort of touched on, um, throughout like things we can do differently or how we, but it'd be great to kind of get to a place where we're going, like this is what you should do, more or less, you know, something.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Push the reset button.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Well, on that.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  If hypothetically you could go back in time.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  And you could change one mistake in your eyes that humans made or one event or one. Um, fruit themed technological advice, uh, device. Um, is there, is there one, is there one thing that you would go back and change?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Tough question. Um, probably not. I think we are where we are. I think the one thing I've learnt about humans is that we are immensely capable of change. And so, you know, I think there's always the temptation to look back historically and try and change trajectory points. But, you know, that's kind of a bit of a, um, a tough question. It's an impossible scenario. So I would rather say, what can we do now? And I think that what we can do now is say, okay, well, let's try and get a better read on where we're at, you know, as a, as a species, if you want to call it that. Better read on, um, the environment we're operating in, the ecosystem that we're kind of living in. Learn from the past and work out a trajectory to get back to that. Um, I mean, I think a good

• 32:13Speaker 01

  proxy is climate change. People worry about, you know, how we're gonna fix the, fix the planet. My answer is really simple. If you could change everyone's mind, I mean, we can all change our mind tomorrow to now, you know, it's pretty easy to mount an argument. So I'm gonna change your mind on something. Um, if, if everyone changed their mind about planting trees or doing something for the climate, we'd fix the whole thing overnight. You know, there's, there's what, nine billion of us on the planet now? Imagine if everyone out and just planted five trees tomorrow.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  There's, you know, nine fives are forty, there's forty five billion trees that just got planted. So our capacity for change is actually unlimited. It's, it's only that psychology, that mindset that says, I, I have no power to change anything as an individual. Yes, you're true. But if we can communicate that, well, everyone can change their mind on stuff or learn something new, we could, we could fix all sorts of stuff. Um, so that's a bit of a dodge.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  No, no, well, I mean, it was a ridiculous question, really.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Trying to bring it back to reality and say, look, I think, you know, there's lots of things we can learn. I think we're certainly on a trajectory that's now, you know, most of us are, I think, are at least aware of some of these issues. We're certainly talking more about mental health and why we're here and how we fix it. Um, so I think, well, one of the things that I can offer or people like me can offer is, well, let's look back and see what we've learnt over the, you know, last ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and find ways to implement it.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I think one of the biggest from this whole chat, the thing that's really kind of like, I don't know, that's impacted me, I guess, I don't think of the word, but, um, is the idea of what you're looking for in these special ops people, that their ability to adapt to any environment and like, that's a skill set. I feel like that would be an incredible thing for us to learn as humans.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  It's something that we're not really actively taught. It's sort of, we're just expected to figure it out.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  In many ways, like through school or work. But I, I don't know, I don't, I can't think of any real world courses or anything that teaches us how to do that.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  No, and it was always implicit learning, wasn't it? You weren't sat down by the elders and go, right, we're gonna teach you how to do this now. Um, so many indigenous cultures to this day still teach through implied learning, you know, you have to do something many, many times, sort of ponder, well, why am I doing this? And the lesson was in the, the doing, it wasn't in the, in the, you know, the talking. Um, and so I think, yeah, that implied learning is, is kind of, um, yeah, lost its, lost its relevance. And we kind of expect everything to be set out for us now in Western cultures. And here's your explicit learning theories, this is what you're gonna have to learn in this course, or this is what you're gonna learn by the end of the course. Um, and we've lost something in that. And again, that's something we could probably take from many indigenous

• 34:54Speaker 01

  communities is that, well, there are processes that acculturate people into these sorts of ways of being in the world that aren't just woo woo hippie, go and live in a TP, weirdo stuff. They're actually, were there for a really strong purpose. And they were, um, evolved practices over many thousands of years for a very specific reason. And that is because that's how humans are meant to, meant to work. We used to call them rites of passage, you know, so you would have a rite of passage into, into adulthood. But you'd also have a rite of passage into parenthood and a rite of passage into, um, elderhood. There were many, you know, sort of ceremonies and sacred processes in many indigenous cultures.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  There's a great book called The Dream, I think it's called The Dreaming Path.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Written by Paul Callaghan.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Um, we've, we spoke to Paul Callaghan a, a few years ago now, but that's a great book, exactly what we can learn from indigenous life.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And as I say, I mean, uh, you know, we tend to, I know it's a bit of a, a sensitive topic in Australia, and importantly so, we tend to look at the indigenous cultures and communities in Australia and say, oh, they learn so many things, but that's not for us.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's separate. It's, yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  But, you know, if you go back into many, uh, I'm just gonna use the Northern European because that's my heritage. If you go back into many of those cultures, it was all still there.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  And in fact, that, the, the parallels with most indigenous learning systems in the world are scarily, scarily similar. It's all, it's the way humans have been forever.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  It's what makes that book so brilliant, The Dreaming Path, is that exact reason. It's like, it's surprising how relevant all the teachings are to today.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  We're all human, I guess.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  We're all still human, yeah. And, you know, most of our DNA is still only, you know, twenty five or thirty thousand years old. So we haven't, you know, evolution doesn't keep up, you know, we, we've changed the world so dramatically in the last thirty years. Is it any wonder?

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  That we aren't sort of coded for it anymore, you know?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Hey, Ryan and Josh.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Permission to advertise my own thing.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Oh, what is your thing?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  The Resilience Project.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Oh, cool. Oh, I mean, permission to get excited about your thing.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  You know what I love? When people come up to me and go like, hey, I just wanna say, the resilience project has completely changed my kid's life. It's saved us. Thank you so much. And I just choose not to tell them that's got nothing to do with me.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  I did the exact same thing. Oh, thanks.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. Well, that, that makes me very happy to hear that. We have now partnered with fourteen hundred schools around Australia. So I think for a lot of people, it's like, yeah, we would love to do a wellbeing program. But my first question, as a principal in a school, they were, do we know it's gonna work? And Monash University found that after six years of doing the resilience project, um, the chance of a child developing an anxiety disorder is, has decreased by thirty four percent. And the chance of developing depressive symptoms decreased by forty seven percent.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  It's so incredible. Not surprising, but amazing to have the numbers.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  So if you wanna see how the resilience project schools wellbeing program could work for your school in two thousand twenty seven, please head to our website, theresilienceproject.com.au and you'll find, um, everything you need to know about our wellbeing program there.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Which, I mean, it kind of makes me think of Alone.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Because watching Alone, it's so educational. It, it's just like, and to state the obvious, that is not a way for most of us to be able to live all the time. So what have you, what have you learnt that we can apply to today's world from that show?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think, uh, much of what we already just talked about, I mean, I think it's, it's one of these amazing, unique opportunities to kind of put people into a unique social experiment. And people are going often thinking that they're going to come out really unhealthy. Uh, and if they get a reasonable amount of food, they actually come back pretty healthy. You know, blood works and other things. We have, we've had, had people go on the show who may have had a, you know, medical condition, like a cardiovascular condition where they're taking a certain, you know, medication, for example, and they actually come off the medication.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Wow, gosh.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Um, you know, we don't have tons of science on that, but we kind of can predict, well, if you're not eating crappy refined food and you're not living in air conditioning and you're not, you know, sort of living a high stress, um, life with poor sleep, well, you might actually get healthier. Um, so there's a couple of caveats in it. Food is one, sleep is another. Sleep is a massive part of, of moderating that cycle. And but, yeah, there's a lot of those conditions which then become conducive to humans becoming human again, you know? They start to reef, resync with those patterns of sunlight and seasonality and, um, you know, the only, I guess, missing one is social contact, which is obviously the core context of the show.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Does that, you see, the people who do really well seem to build relationships with the environment around them. I think of Gina Chick who would see having conversations with the river and with mountains and with the clouds and with the animals around her. Is that, like, is that something we've lost as well?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. So there's this concept of, you know, the more than human world, which I think we just talk about loosely as nature. Most of us who've ever kept a pet know that you can have a relationship with nature. You know, most animals, you know, are easily able to, you're able to form a relationship with them. But that next level of being able to form relationship with place, I mean, again, going back to our comment, conversation about indigenous sort of learning systems, it was often, you know, the, the knowledge was buried in the landscape. You knew how the rivers had formed because there was a story about that. You interacted with the rivers or you interacted with the trees because that's where you collected harvest. So you intimately had a relationship with these places, if not just because of necessity, because you needed to survive and

• 40:28Speaker 01

  drink water and collect food, but because they supported you. If you were able to read those patterns, you could sort of dodge the bullets, so to speak, you know, you could know when a weather system was coming in and prepare for it. Well, you knew when the ice was gonna freeze over and you had to have enough supplies of food in order to predict that and get through that initial period before you could walk out and, you know, ice fish, for example. So we had these relationships with place that allowed us to actually thrive rather than constantly being in, in sort of some sort of fight with nature. How do we suppress it? How do we stop it? How do we make it do what we want it to do? Which involves more energy, you know, more thinking, more, more sort of, uh, geo engineering solutions as opposed to, well, how do we actually go with the flow?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Makes me think of, I, I quite obsessively measure my sleep and the quality of my sleep. And I take magnesium before I go to bed, do all the stuff that we're meant to do. And I get a sleep score, like I add at a hundred every single morning. And I, first thing I do, I look at, wake up, is look at, see how I went.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  The only time I've ever got above ninety five or ninety six, first time ever in like, five years of Resilience Watch, was when I was camping, which I don't like doing, um, in Mount Kosovo, in the snow, in the most uncomfortable, like, we were on an angle where we mentioned, they passed with a tent, and it was freezing cold. I'm in my clothes. Um, and I wake up to sleep through a ninety six and.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Did you have your water pillow?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  I didn't have my water pillow.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  I didn't even have a pillow. There was no pillow. It was just, and I'm sleeping like in between two other men. One I know well, the other one never been in my life before. We are literally touching shoulders as we're sleeping. The best sleep I've had since I've had this watch, which is five years.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, again, picking up on that point, I mean, there's a reason why many special forces personnel still sleep on the floor when they get home.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I find it far more, you know, like a bit of sleep. So actually, um, once you're out in that environment and you start to synchronize with all of those patterns. It becomes a self licking ice cream, as we say in the military. And it's kind of like, oh, that's what we're supposed to do, you know? We've been doing this for a hundred and ninety thousand years. We've been sleeping on the ground. It's actually where we're supposed to be.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  I'm sleeping outside tonight.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Let's all do it together, shoulder to shoulder.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  But look, yeah, there's lots of reasons, you know, reasons to sort of say, do we have hard science? No. But from a common sense logic perspective, well, you know, maybe we were designed to actually deal with some discomfort.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's the thing that I feel so obvious from the conversation, but we have. Strive so hard to remove any discomfort at any point in our life. I've absolutely fallen flat in the last couple of years, especially we've. Had some challenges at home with family stuff, so I feel like I've adjusted the other side to go, I'm going to do everything else I can, everything I can control.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  To make sure there's, because there's so much discomfort in, in family stuff, I'm going to try and create. So much comfort in every other area of my life. I've definitely gone way too far.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Um, and think about it way too much and stress about it way too much. And I think it's sort of had this, um, opposite effect for me.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's what I think as well. I think it's, um, coming back to that book, The Comfort Crisis, you know, it's actually discomfort that, that. Kind of pushes the reset button in many ways and says to your body and your mind, um, oh, actually, we're a species that's learnt to survive. But we, we've always faced adversity in doing that. And once you take the adversity away, your body sort of goes and your mind goes, well, okay, I'm just falling in heat now. Um, you know, you can kind of chill out and just wander aimlessly and, and, and, you know, perhaps. Not so surprisingly, we now see, you know, much higher rates of lifestyle based illnesses from a.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Physical perspective and, and much higher rates of mental health issues from, from a cognitive perspective. Um, yet we've taken away all the discomfort. There's something missing there.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, doesn't that up?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Over the last, uh, four or five years, um, I would say the number one thing for my. Number one? Yeah, maybe that's going a bit far, but definitely up there with the top things for my own mental health. And when I've been struggling. Has been gardening.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Um, we, it's, I love it and winter I find a bit harder because there's less to do.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  But I wondered, I've been wanting to ask someone about the science behind gardening. I can tell, talk, um, anecdotally that. Going out there and checking it when, especially in spring, when things are starting to grow and then there's things to do. And there's little jobs and this monitoring, my wife and I, as we're such a, we're, we're turning into, we live in, um, Preston. Uh, in Melbourne and there's a lot of noners and old, old, old men who, um, walk around in their dressing gown. In the morning, checking the garden. And now at, at like in our thirties, my wife and I have taken to dressing gown walks around the garden with a coffee.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Did you have to buy one especially?

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Actually, we're.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  My gardening gown.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  My gardening gown. But it's our favorite, it's one of our favorite things of the week is to spend a little bit of time, just like. My checking on each individual plant to see how it's going. I'd love to ask you a bit about what is going on there from a. Mental health point of view, why does that feel so good?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of reasons. I mean, um, A, you've just identified a, a social aspect to it. You've, you know, identified with people who are elderly and. You know, clearly care for their community and care for, for, you know, parts of the, I guess, the ecosystems within the community that are important. And many of those, you know, we used the word nono, so I'm assuming you're talking sort of, you know, Italian.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Is it? Yeah, a lot, a lot of Greek and Italian.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, who, who all come from small villages, who all shared produce, who all, you know, had cultural systems that supported a village lifestyle. And so there's probably something about that you're tapping into as well. I'd like to see the picture of the dressing gown first.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Um, but from a, I guess a physiological perspective, coming back to what we've been talking about, I mean, um, I think the minute, and, and most people are the same. You know, would you prefer to go for a walk in a park or in a city? Most people will say a park.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Because immediately, you know, I think at, at that embedded sort of DNA genetic level, we know that being able to read systems and. And by that, I mean, seasons, understand how plants work, you know, how to grow things and produce things. It just ticks a whole lot of sort of survival boxes for us, doesn't it? I can provide for myself. I can grow food. I know how that works. I know when to plant things. Um, I'm actually producing something with my hands, you know, which is tangible and actually sustains me. You know, being food. Um, and more importantly, you made, you made the reference that there's not as much to do in winter. Well, that's only because the Western system doesn't, isn't really great at producing crops that are transportable in winter.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  So you go back into, again, northern European cultures, for example, and I can only talk about them. But there's tons of things you can grow in winter.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just that no one produces seeds from them.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Because why would you need to? There's no mass produced sort of cropping system designed to produce any of these vegetables. Cause they don't transport well, they don't store, so there's no commercial value to them. But in a small village in Italy, you know, up in the Alps, for example. They'll, they'll, they'll tell you lots of things that grow in winter.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Wheat, so winter, winter crop here, so, you know.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Um, there's lots of things that I think, again, we've kind of been denied is not the right word, but we've lost the knowledge of how to, you know. Um, engage in those systems through what is perhaps inadvertently commercialization of those products.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but absolutely, there's a whole field of therapy called horticultural therapy, which, um, you know, came out of ironically, out of, um, World War One and World War Two. So a lot of repatriation hospitals back in the UK, um, you know, when people were injured and they were taken back. Behind, you know, sort of the, the front lines to rehabilitate. They were often put in hospitals who had massive gardens. And part of the initial sort of treatment was just get them involved in, you know, outside, get them outside. Solar therapy was actually legitimate in those days, getting people out in the sunshine, surprise, surprise. Um, so a lot of the, uh, retreats in the Alps in Europe were designed around getting people out in the sunshine at altitude in the cold.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Can you talk about the science of the sun for us and why that is so powerful for our mental?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so we're energetic creatures, um, and, and again, um, vitamin D is synthesized primarily on our skin. Uh, and the most powerful source of synthesizing vitamin D is sunlight. So when UV hits our skin, it synthesizes. Uh, through melanin, melatonin, melatonin into, you know, people take melatonin to go to sleep at night. Um, we need to take melatonin to take, go to sleep at night because most of us don't see a sunrise in the morning. The specific wavelength of light coming up in the morning, if it hits the back of your retina, it triggers, um. Uh, the clock genes in your genes to say, oh, we're gonna, we're awake now. We need to fire up all those metabolic processes that start.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  The daylight cycle. And by the way, we'll put a little alarm clock for about twelve hours from now, twelve to fifteen hours from now. To go to sleep. So in twelve to fifteen hours, we need to trigger the release of melatonin. So if you don't get that sunlight signal in the mornings. You don't get the sleep signal at night. And then most of us then hijack it by staring at a screen at nighttime anyway. So then it resets the clock again. So we're lying awake at night, trying to go to sleep. What do we do to supplement that? We take melatonin. Um, magnesium is a precursor for melatonin. Um, and so we've kind of hijacked this whole thing to try and, you know, put Band-Aids on it. Um, but coming back to, yeah, growing plants, I mean, they operate in the same solar cycles as we do. You already know that, you know, you said.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  We plant certain things at springtime and things start to grow. Um, there are certain plants that are genetically coded to grow at certain times of the year. Both from a temperature and sunlight perspective. Why are we any different?

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  You know, why aren't we meant to operate on a twelve, twelve month cycle? Well, of course we are. Hormonally, we're no different. You know, plants operate pretty much the same way we do. They just use, um, you know, sunlight to convert, um, you know, through their chloroplast. They, they generate electricity or energy in that form. We just do it, you know, the inverse way. We take in. Um, nutrients and we use the sunlight to, to trigger the hormones that digest the food. So.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  What with Alone, um, how, well, I'm interested to know how that came about in the first place. Were you, you've done SAS, is that right?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um, my entry into reality TV was through a, an army doctor, a mate of mine, Sam, g'day. Um, and so I got out of the military, out of special forces, was just doing some reserve stuff. Uh, got a phone call from a production company out of the blue really and said, oh, we're looking to, um, you know, employ a psychologist to come and work on a reality TV show that, you know, is going to take people into a relatively austere, demanding environment, kind of starve them of calories. Would you be interested? I kind of went, oh, TV, I don't know. Anyway, I knew that this person was married to the mate of mine, so I rang, rang Sam, said, what's going on? He said, just put in a quote, it'll be fine. So that was Survivor when Survivor first came back to Australia.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Oh, that was Survivor?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, Survivor Australia. Um, so I worked on that for a few seasons. I, I guess, um, people liked my approach to, to sort of the way of supporting people on the show, which is all very much based on the ex-military sort of model. And it went from there, so I picked up a whole heap of other sort of similar survival-y type shows. Um, funnily enough, I was a bit of a fan of Alone myself, um, uh, the US version. And, um, I remember having a chat to an executive producer a couple of years ago. I think I was working on Love Island of all shows, but,

• 52:15Speaker 01

  but saying, oh, if you've seen this show Alone in the States, you know, it's awesome. It'd be great if it came to Australia. I mean, if it ever comes to Australia and you end up working on it, give me a call. And they're so strangely enough, he gave me a call and said, hey, guess what?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  So were you working on Gina Chick's season?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I've worked on all four seasons, um, so far.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  So what was it about Gina that, that in your like professional point of view, made her so incredible at that experience?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Well, be careful not to strain to professional boundaries here because obviously I'm technically her psychologist, but, um, look, I think Gina was, you know, pretty open in saying that, you know, her, her capacity to kind of align herself with, with those patterns of nature and having had experience for many, many years in ori doing that, was probably the major skill set, you know, she could come into this with some experience of, of reading the patterns of nature, of forming a relationship to nature, as you said, as well. Um, that gave her the, you know, the upper hand and that, you know, she was never really alone.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Hmm. It's, it sort of seems like people on Alone and maybe in military situations as well, people really miss being out there. What, what is going on there?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  I think what I would say, having talked to, to most of the, you know, contestants on these shows and worked in other places like, special forces and Antarctic expeditioners, it's, it's, it's actually missing that relationship. You know, it's a form of grief in some ways, you know, you've, you've formed a very intimate relationship with a particular place and a particular ecosystem that's supported you to survive, you know, which is pretty amazing. Um, and then you just go back to normal everyday life. So it would be normal if you had a, an intimate relationship with somebody, let's say in, say the military, where your life depends on these other group of people. Would you miss them? Absolutely, and you know, many, I think, ex-service personnel would identify with that sense of loss,

• 54:05Speaker 01

  that, you know, that brotherhood, sisterhood, whatever you want to call it. I mean, I don't know, even I experienced it as a psychologist, we're not removed from that as either. Um, yeah, there's a sense of loss, um, which is not acknowledged by the general community. You know, so in the military context, it's, oh, we go back to your normal everyday life, you go back to being a civilian. Hmm. You can't ever really do that because you've been fundamentally changed by the experience. So you're not the same person and you're coming back with, uh, fresh eyes to see what, you know, your family, your community is now, how they're living and you can't unsee that. And I think the same thing applies for Alone, you know, people go and have this experience where perhaps they are,

• 54:46Speaker 01

  fortunate enough to really see what it's like to be a, just a single human trying to, you know, live in that ecosystem and see how reliant we are on that ecosystem to allow us to survive there.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Uh, and then you just come back and just move on to normal, you know, join the queue, buy your latte in the mornings, it's like, you can't undo that.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  There's a certain type of loneliness that I've experienced in different parts of my life. And that is the, it's the kind of confusing and surprising loneliness that you sometimes feel when you're in a big city by yourself and surrounded by thousands and thousands of people.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  And if you're travelling or even not, but if, if you live by yourself and there are all these people around you and you're making an effort to go out every day, but you still feel lonely despite being surrounded by people. What's, what's going on there?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Well, probably a couple of things, I think with the, the quality of the relationships we have now, again, you know, not, not individually at fault, but perhaps culturally at fault, we don't, we don't build those village-minded sort of structures whereby you are intimately reliant on, um, the people around you and intimately know their life stories from, you know, births, deaths, marriages, funerals, where people are buried. Um, we, we don't have that anymore, so we are disconnected, I think, to some degree from those cultural fabrics, which, which, um, allow us to feel at home and at place and know that we can call on the social structures. But also, you know, the second layer of that, of course, is we're now disconnected from, from place as well, you know.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Cities are fairly impersonal, there's no, not, not a lot of social structures or cultural structures in cities. They're just, you know, concrete and roads designed, um, from an engineering perspective, nothing against engineers, my dad's one. Um, but, you know, we, we used to, if you go to some of the, you know, Pacific islands, they, they, their, gravestones are all in the front of their houses, you know, so they bury their local, you know, their, their family, they stay with them. So they're, they're never alone because they've got the spirits and the energies sort of, and the memory of people are omnipresent. They're there all the time. So, you know, cities have become very impersonal and very culturally sort of blank slates in a lot of times.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Which is why you see people, I think, you know, craving for, you know, what's called in the literature, the third, third room or the third place. You know, they want to go to cafes or they want to go to libraries. They want to go to social spaces just to be around people because they're craving that connection. Not just with people, but also with the culture that's embedded in that place. You go to a coffee shop because you like the vibe, right? Not just because the person behind the counter smiles at you nicely. You like the vibe and there's something about that, which I think is embedded in us from a DNA perspective that allowed us to thrive. You know, you know your place, you're embedded in the place, you're part of the place. And if you want to get really esoteric about it, you know, one of the questions I often ask people is, where does yourself, you know, that word in quotation marks, where does it start and stop? Is it at the layer of your skin?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  We're coming back to our conversation about reflected personality, how do you construct your view of yourself? Then is that just contained to you or do you exist in the minds of, you know, your family and friends and they're thinking about you? And so yourself is not just you physically, although that's what we're taught. It's you socially and culturally and embedded in place as well.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  You grow things, you, you know, it becomes an extension of you, they're your trees, aren't they? Your vegetables, and you actually then consume them, so they become part of you.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  The cycle, you know, of, of actually being embedded in a place is, is, um, more than just a metaphorical, it's an actual physical thing.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  It's sort of like that, um, when you are feeling that loneliness, especially if you're in a foreign city and you just feel so distant from any sense of self or home or what you're describing. And then like a barista at a cafe is really nice to you.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  It is like an explosion.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  In, in, it's like, oh, thank, like, you have no idea how important that, that was.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  We're drawn to it like magnets.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Hard-coded for that sense of connection.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Not just psychologically, but socially, culturally, ecologically, we're drawn to it. And I think that's just because we're hard-wired to know that that's how you survive, that's how you actually survive. We've, we've perhaps been lulled into this false sense of security by saying, if I have all the technology and I've got a supermarket down the road, I'm safe. Hmm. I've been to war zones where people, you know, pretty quickly realise that that really matters, but your neighbours do.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  I, um, I never expected, my, my kids have just started school, my oldest kids just started school.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  And the thing, I, yeah, it's awesome. And I did not expect, I drop him off, uh, when I drop him off.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  It's the best part of my week is walking through that school ground and saying hello to all the other parents and some new kids that I've just met that are becoming his friends. I take him into the classroom. I ask a kid about something and we have like a running joke from the day before and I say a couple of words to a couple of other parents on the way out and then I go off on my day. It is honestly the best part of it. And I'm getting like tingles thinking about how much I love seeing those people that I've just started to meet this year. That feeling of belonging there, that feeling of community, that feeling of us all having a collective connection to the place, to the school, but also to a purpose of why we're all there. It just, nothing makes me feel as good as

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  that at the moment.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  No, you've just, you've ticked all the boxes, haven't you? You've got social, you know, parenting, so raising the next generation, a sense of place, which often schools are really great at, you know, connection into like-minded group of people, the village, you know, that are all raising kids together. And that old saying, you know, it takes a village to raise kids. Well, of course it does. It's not just because you need babysitters at nine o'clock at night, but it's because you actually need this interaction with other parents to go, am I doing this right? Is this okay? Am I normal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're facing the same stress, you know, we've, we've just sort of discredited a lot of that, segmented it out. But absolutely, they're the things that cement you into place. And my wife and I have moved to north eastern Victoria, you know, probably 10 years ago

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  to do exactly that, you know, to get to a smaller, smaller town where everybody kind of knows your business. And that's, you know, sort of discredited in most of, you know, most of societies. Like, why would you not want people to know your business? Because they'll support us, you know, it's called building social capital. We know their business and we can look after them and in return they'll look after us. And, you know, we, we recently just bought a house in town. But, you know, before we'd even moved in, we'd had three people go, oh, we know that house, you know, such and such lived there for five generations and they lived there and we've had Christmases on those front porches. And it's kind of like, okay, so there's actually a history to this house that we, you know, when you buy a house, you just think you're buying a house, right?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  But now we're buying a, a part of the community as well. And it's our part of the fabric of other people's lives, not just our lives. And that was a little bit spooky at first, but the more I think about it, it's like, that's pretty cool. We actually now have responsibility for maintaining some of those memories in that particular place. There's trees planted there that were planted by previous, you know, owners and there's a story to that.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  For people who this, this conversation really resonates with them, they're thinking, yep, that's, that makes complete sense to me. And they want to start doing some things to align themselves, everything you've just spoken about, without making it a stressful routine that's in your calendar. And there are just a few things you think of, are just easy things to just start doing.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first one is just, is take notice. So, you know, A, get outside whenever you can, even if it's for 10 minutes in the morning, you know, and start to try and, yeah, read those patterns, what's happening in the world around you, not just on your phone, but, you know, in the news feed, but go outside and see what the sun's doing today. What's the weather doing today? You know, what's going on at the school when you drop the kids off? What's one of the key events in the, you know, sometimes it's, feels like it's small fry and it's not that important. But in, in a community sense, they're the things that keep the fabric, you know, glued back together. So just taking notice and allocating time. I agree. I don't think stacking it on as an extra tick the box activity, but making it an incidental activity that you can do. Most of us can get outside

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  and just take notice of what the clouds are doing today. Where's the weather coming from? Rather than, we always check the weather on our app. My wife always says, what's the weather going to be today? I say, look out the frigging window. You've got a five kilometre view from our front windows. Have a look. Sorry, Eliza. But, you know, yeah, just, just getting back into those patterns of what humans have probably always done, which is just to take notice, be curious and, and think about, well, you know, what, what of the patterns that I'm about to do today are actually sustaining me from a human perspective? And what are actually just ticking boxes activities that, you know, I have to do because I have to pay the bills and we all have those. But try and push the, you know, push the

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  dial slowly from the have to do's to the, I have to do my mindfulness today. Or could you do mindfulness outside on the grass, you know, watching the sun? And sort of slowly move it across. It's hard. I get it. I mean, you know, I've got two kids, I've got a mortgage, I've got a job. You know, I, I struggle. And I've got 30 years of psychology and all these cool experiences behind me. But I think the only way we can do it is to keep, just kind of push the needle, reevaluate and recheck it. And then talk to like-minded people. Go, how are you finding it? What are, what's working for you?

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Well, thank you so much, Mark. I think it's, this will resonate with so many people. And I, I feel like it will make such a positive impact on some of people's lives. So, thanks.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Pleasure. Talk about it any time, isn't it? All day.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  Thanks, Mark.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  If you enjoyed this episode and want a little more, you might enjoy our subscriber only apps, available on Patreon and Apple Podcasts. If you want a little more but don't want to pay anymore, then you can join our newsletter at theimperfects.com.au. And while you're there, you'll be able to see the names and faces of all the incredible people who help make this show. A show made on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Wurundjeri people, and we pay our respects to elders past and present. The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment. The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you're struggling, please see a healthcare professional or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.