Move Your Body, Free Your Mind: The Science of Movement and Mental Health with Caroline Williams

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's the most common beat in Western pop music. And
it's also this resonant frequency at which if you just
let people walk, that's what they will go to. And
if you get people to tap along to a beat
in a lab, that's also the beat that they are
most accurate at.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,

(00:39):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in

(01:00):
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
What if one of the most effective tools for your
mental health was your body, not as a replacement for
therapy or medication, but is something with profound power in
its own right. For me, If I could only choose
one intervention for my mood, for my mental health, it
would probably be exercise. And today's guest, Carolyn Williams, helps

(01:29):
explain why, as a science journalist, she spent years studying
the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation.
In this conversation, we'll explore how movement of all kinds, walking, stretching, dancing,
even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape. I'm Eric Zimmer
and this is the one you feed. Hi, Caroline, Welcome.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
To the show, Hillo, Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
I'm excited to talk to you about your book. It's
called move How, The New Science of Body Movement and
Set your Mind Free. And listeners know I am a
big proponent of moving my body, primarily in order to
make my mind feel better. So we'll get into all
that in a little bit, but let's start like we
always do, with a parable. In the parable, there's a

(02:15):
grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well,

(02:36):
which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
I think it's a really fascinating one because not only
is it true in life, but in science.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
You know, there's a real basis for this.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Before I got really into movement, my career twenty years
or so as a science journalist was looking at the
plasticity of the human brain and how it changes. And
it really is true that what we do, the way
we behave, the way we think, gets written into our
brains in you know, physical connections between neurons and in
the pathways, and you know, as you sort of walk

(03:18):
these paths through.

Speaker 4 (03:19):
Your brain, they become more.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Worn in worn in Yeah, that's the word I'm thinking of, indented,
but that's not.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
Really the word I mean.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
But yeah, they've become like like pass through long grass,
they become better traveled. And so, yeah, it's absolutely true
that if you choose to be positive and to choose
kindness and compassion. That's been shown many times that that
can actually change the way your brain works and the
way you live your lives. So there really is something

(03:48):
solid behind that, and that's sort of the way I
like to operate that I guess.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
I guess I'm a bit of a natural skeptic.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
I want to look for the science, look for, you know,
where the evidence lies, and it absolutely does back that up.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
So I tried to live that way myself.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, I was reflecting earlier today on you know, I
occasionally just somewhat jokingly say like, well, I'm just a
bag of chemicals, right, Like, yeah, at the end of
the day, we've got neurotransmitters, and we've got hormones, and
we've got electrical connections and synapses, and it's just all
very physical, you know, it has a very physical element

(04:22):
to it. It's chemicals, all that sort of stuff, and
yet those things both control how we feel and then
also the things that we do can change those chemicals.
There's just such an interesting interaction between the two that
you would think like, well, if it's all chemicals, then
the way to intervene is chemically, but not necessarily and

(04:42):
your book is a big testament to that that there
are ways of changing what's happening inside not just our body,
but our brain through the way we move.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Absolutely, I mean that's one of the things that got
me started on this whole thing. I've been so interested
for many years and what's happening in the brain and
how to you know, change brain chemistry, how to change
the way you think and feel focused on the brain,
and then it sort of became obvious to me that
thinking of your brain as if it's not attached to
the rest of.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
You is kind of weird. And of course.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
There's all this pipework that you know, all the blood
flow packed with hormones and all kinds of other stuff,
and all the wiring and the electrical activity that's going
up and down our nerves. That all impacts what happens chemically,
physically and as a result, emotionally and the way that
we are able to think. So obviously what happens below

(05:36):
the neck matters for how we think and feel. And
going on from that, it became quite obvious that things
that we do to our bodies can change that chemical
environment and change the electrical environment and has.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
A knock on effect on everything.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
So in a way it's liberating because you can then
use your body as an extension to to sort of
tweak these parameters and change the way that you feel,
in the way that life feels to you as well
sort of outlook on the world.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah. I always find it funny when people talk about
like the brain body connection as if they discovered something radical, Like, oh,
I mean, obviously it's always been connected, you know, I'm
not quite sure how we got to it's so disconnected.
I had a strangely I'm taking things off topic here,
sort of not really. I had an epiphany about a

(06:24):
week and a half ago. I was doing Loving Kindness
meditation and it was a guided meditation, and the leader
of the meditation instructed you to try and notice where
in your body you're feeling. This thing happened and I
realized where I was feeling it mostly was my face,
and I had been discounting the face as part of

(06:46):
my body for a long time. Every time I was
told look for where this emotion is in your body.
If I noticed it in my face, I was like, no,
that's my head. Where's in my body?

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, yeah, But I had this moment where I was
like a dummy. Hey, your face.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
Your face is part of your body.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Is part of your body. It is an emotional center.
It's where I happen to feel a lot of things.
And that's sort of on topic as far as the
brain body connection.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
No, I mean it's really relevant because a lot of
people struggle to tune in to where these feelings are.
So there's this thing called alexithymia where people aren't able
to put name to their emotions. And if you can't
do that, then it's really hard to regulate your emotions.
So things like meditation and you know, checking in with
your body can be a way of tuning in and

(07:35):
going okay, so I'm feeling this right now. I wonder
how I can change what I'm doing with my body
or you know, with my face which is part of
my body, and how that can then have a feedback
that will maybe make me feel differently.

Speaker 4 (07:50):
So yeah, that's really really relevant.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
And so that came up quite a lot in my
research that being able to tune into your body and
know what it needs, and know what your.

Speaker 4 (07:59):
Entire body, brain mind needs.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Is a really important skill and because and often if
we're so sedentary we're so disconnected from our body, we're
up in our heads all the time, that we don't
often make that connection. So it's a really important aspect
of tuning in to your body.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, so let's start with talking a little bit about
what the brain evolved to do. And I'd also like
to talk a little bit about what certain people think
the brain is doing, what its role is. Can we
talk about those two things real quickly before we move
into the specifics of movement.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Absolutely, because this is where it all comes back to.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
So we tend to have this idea that brains are
there for thinking and you know, working stuff out. But actually,
if you look way back in our evolutionary history, not
every organism on the planet has a brain. Even a
lot of animals don't have brains, and at some point
evolution had to make a decision whether brains were worth

(08:57):
investing in or not. And there's this very well known
neuroscientists called rodelpho Linas from Columbia, and he pointed out
that there's this creature called the sea squirt. In their
adult form, they just look like sort of bagpipe stuck
to the bottom of the ocean, and they suck in
water through one pipe and they blow it out through
the other and they don't move. But in the young form,
in the larval form, they're sort of like tadpoles. They

(09:18):
swim around the ocean and their job in life is
to find a place on the ocean to attach and
live out the rest of their lives. And when they're
in this juvenile stage, they have sort of a very
basic brain, and the reason for this is that it
needs to coordinate its movements away from things that are
harmful and towards rewards. So it's a basic system what

(09:39):
will kill me, what will help me pass on my genes,
And so this basic brain is connected to its basic
tail and it swims around. When this lava finds the
perfect spot, it attaches basically by gluing its head to
a rock, and one of the first things it does
is reabsorbs its entire nervous system and it never makes
any decisions again. So Lena said, well, this just goes

(10:02):
to show what a brain is for. A brain is
for informing your movements in the world so that it
can increase your chances of survival by taking you towards
things that will keep you alive and taking you away
from things that will kill you. And if you're not
going to move, then you don't need the brain. And
you know, they're expensive bits of kit, their high energy,
they take a lot to run. And so yeah, from

(10:24):
right early on, brains were there to inform our movements
in the world. And you can see that everything that's
been added on later right up to our you know,
our clever emotions. You know, in fact, emotion comes from
the words the Latin for.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
To move away from something.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
So emotions inform us about what we need to get
away from and what we need to get to. So
everything else that's come since then has been about informing
our movements in the world, which.

Speaker 4 (10:50):
Is something that you don't often think about. You think, brains.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yeah, us, we've got a cracking brain for thinking of
very clever thoughts. But at the basis of it, our
brains are there to help us move sensibly.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah. I love that analogy of the c squirt. It
explains a lot about the editor of this podcast, Chris
also and what has happened to him. I think basically
what you said is once they stop moving, they basically
just get rid of their brain. They just don't have
it anymore.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it just gets recycled because the
energy can be reused for something else. And you know,
I'm not saying that the poor editor. I'm sure he's
a lovely man, very clever enough.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Let's just say he doesn't move much and he's not
very smart. I'm just making some connections here.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
I wouldn't like to comment, but it's true that, you know,
in humans, especially this use it or lose it nature
of our brains became even more sort of tied together
in the point of our evolution when we became hunters
and gatherers, because then, you know, our ancestors could maybe
sit around in trees munching on fruit and get away

(11:50):
with it, and they were absolutely fine. When we started
moving further afield and looking for food, we had to
evolve to be able to stand on our feet and
walk long distance and you know, forage far and wide
and hunt. But we also needed to be able to
work together to bring down prey because humans are quite
puny really, you know, we're not very fast, we're not

(12:11):
very strong. We also needed to be able to communicate,
to work together to remember the way home. And there's
a lot of cognitive work that goes into being a
hunt togetherer. And so there's this idea that that once
we started taking this this way of life, our physiology
tied together moving around, being active with the health of
our brain. And that explains why, you know, we've known

(12:34):
for a long time that physical activity prompts the brain
to be particularly plastic. It adds more connections, it adds
more blood flow. You know, everything works better when you've
been active. And the reason for that is because these
two things go together. At that point in oary evolution,
it stopped being optional to move because if we don't
move as much as our evolutionary history says we should,

(12:55):
then the brain starts making savings, and over a lifetime
that can be quite significan. And so you know, there
is these quite frightening statistics that thirteen percent of Alzheimer's
cases can be traced to a sedentary lifestyle. So over
your lifespan, you know, if you're too sedentury, Yeah, that
can have a real impact on how your brain ages.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah, Alzheimer's is a topic near and dear to my
heart and my partner, Jenny's heart. Her mom is deep
in that disease. Now, so brain health in general is
better with movement. Lots of studies show that, I want
to pivot a little bit to mental health now, which
is similar but slightly different. You say that poor mental

(13:36):
health might be part of the price we pay for
a cushy life of sofas and supermarkets.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day,
we are the only creatures on the planet where movement
is optional. You know, we can get food, we can
find a mate, we can entertain ourselves, we can do
everything we like from sitting down and just moving our
thumbs and fingers a little bit if we want to.
So we have to seek it out, and you.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
Know, statistics suggests that by and large we don't.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
And also working life nowadays, you know, even for people
who write about movement for a living, spend a lot
of time sitting in this.

Speaker 4 (14:10):
Very chair and not moving.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
So we have to seek it out if we're going
to do it. And obviously there's a real change over
over the past decades. We move a lot less than
even sort of our parents' generation. And we have seen
this catastrophic rise in mental ill health and loneliness and
all these other sort of things. And clearly there's more
than one thing going on I'm not saying, oh, well,
that's you know, a straight line between our sedentary lifestyles

(14:34):
and mental health. But given that we have got this
trend and we know that movement, exercise, even just going
for a walk is really really important and really good
boost for mental health, as is strength training. That's a
really really important one that a lot of people neglect.
Being physically stronger has been shown really really conclusively to

(14:55):
help with anxiety and depression and just make people feel
more powerful in the world and able to cope. So
this is measured psychologists called global self efficacy, and that's
just basically a way of saying I feel like I
can handle stuff. And when people have improved their physical
strength through weight training or body weight training, they do

(15:17):
feel more capable. So I think there's a real role
to play in becoming more active in particular ways as
well that could really improve people's mental health.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
I'm going to jump backwards a little bit. Maybe I
want to talk a little bit about interoception and what
it is and how that leads to what certain scientists
call a global emotional moment, and then link in how
movement ties into that.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, so interception is sort of a little known sense
that we have, and it's the sense of the internal
state of our body. So rather than thinking of, you know,
the brain as the master computer that sort of just
sends messages downstream, interception is about a cross talk between
the body and brain, So you think of the brain

(16:01):
more as a sort of facilitator that sort of takes
all the information that's coming in about you know, what
hormones are in the blood, whether you're hungry, whether you're thirsty,
whether you're feeling, whether the fight or flight response is
kicked in. You know, all these kinds of things that
are going on, even down to our heartbeat, you know,
the way that we're digesting our food. All this information

(16:23):
is being passed back and forth brain and body all
the time. And what we know is that slight differences
in the messages that are going from the body, these
interceptive messages can really affect mental health. And there's this
whole body of research now that suggests that some people
are more or less sensitive to their interceptive signals, and
that can make you more or less susceptible to things

(16:45):
like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all kinds of mental health issues.
And it's involved in things like autism and ADHD and
all these kinds of things. The global emotional moment is
basically your brain picture, you know, taking in all this information.
So there's a part of the brank called the insular
that takes all this information and puts it all together

(17:08):
and comes up with a sense of how I feel now,
and the eye bit of it than me. The sense
of self comes from these bodily signals and pushing them
all together brings this global emotional moment. And so it
stands to reason that if you do anything to change
these messages, then that global emotional moment will change. And

(17:28):
so I think tweaking the dials is something that could
really benefit people. As I said earlier, tuning in doing
something to change the messages, and that will change the
way you feel in the moment but also in the
long term. So the strength stuff is really interesting because
the idea behind why strength might make you feel more
capable is that you're upgrading these intraceptive signals from your

(17:49):
muscles and from your bones that are just maybe given
this unconscious sense that I'm strong. It's fine, you can
stand down the anxiety because if anything happens, I can
handle it, and maybe that's what explains the very strong
link between increased strength and feeling more powerful.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah. I think this is a really important topic, this
idea of interoception and signals coming from the body, that
we aggregate them generally, and it creates this global emotional
moment because I've spent a lot of time thinking about
do thoughts cause emotions? Do emotions cause thought? And you know,
it's a big debate a lot in psychology, and I

(18:26):
think the answer, as near as I can tell, it's
a bi directional relationship. I almost more and more am
starting to go are they even different or they co arise?

Speaker 4 (18:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
The thing that first got me really going, wait, I'm
not sure that thought always causes emotion is because I
was able to notice very clearly some days I would
wake up and I would just immediately feel a certain
way before I'd had any thought, and then it felt
like every thought got filtered through that feeling. And that's

(18:56):
what you're describing, that global emotional moment is sort of
like the weather that's inside our brain. Yeah, and then
our thoughts can't help but to some degree be influenced
by that weather.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
So one way I thought I heard it described what
I really like is background music. It's sort of like
the background music to our life. So like when you're
watching a film. You know, you're watching a horror film
and you can't quite work out while you're feeling on edge,
but it's the background movement that's kind of making you nervous.
And Yeah, by changing these introceptive messages, you can change
the background music on your life so that rather than

(19:33):
feeling like oh god, you know, you know, you can
actually do something that makes everything feel a bit more
positive and feel a bit more possible. That's what the
power of movement do in the moment and long term
that if you can change those messages, then in general
your background movements, your life will be.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
Better and will be happier, will be more capable.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Yeah, we interviewed, it's been years ago, a woman named
Michelle Seeger, and she had done some writing on movement
and how it makes us feel. And she said something,
I won't get it exactly right, but it's stuck with
me all these years, all these interviews, which is like,
if your body doesn't feel good, your brain, your mental state,
you're going to feel like shit. The flavor of that

(20:13):
may depend on your particular neurosis and conditioning, but if
the body is out of whack, it's going to influence it.
And I think that's what we're saying, and within ter reception,
what you're saying is when we move, it helps the
body be in a better place, and thus the messages
that we're getting in the brain are better. Changing that
background music to something that is more enjoyable.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, and in sort of ways that you can't even
put your finger on.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
So just like you know, when you're feeling down and
depressed and miserable, sometimes you don't know why, yeah, you know,
but if you can improve the background messages, then you
can just feel okay, yeah, for reasons that you don't
have to dwell on. You just be okay and you're
bumbling along through your life and everything is groovy. So yeah,
there's a lot you can do. And I think it
was not really a surprise to me when I start

(20:59):
to thinking of movement this way. It was sort of
a penny dropping, like, well, of course, I never feel
more like myself than when I'm halfway through a yoga class,
or you know, on a long walk or or you know,
kayaking or just doing something active.

Speaker 4 (21:14):
I know who I am.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
I feel good, I know what I'm capable of, and
everything's great if I'm slumped down not moved. I mean,
I had to isolate the ten days when I had COVID.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Oh my goodness. I was the worst version of myself ever.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
I mean, in theory I could have written several books
in that time, but well not really.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
But you know, I could have done a lot.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Of work, but I was so miserable. I was so lethargic,
you know. And I think if anyone who is quite
active sort of knows this in themselves, but it's kind
of interesting to put the science and the philosophy behind
it and say, yeah, for me, that means there are
good reasons to seek it out and to not be
lazy even though it's comfortable.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah. This speaks to two of the mantras that I
use on the show. The most one is depression hates
a moving target. It has always been true in my case.
And then the other is sometimes you can't think your
way into right action. You have to act your way
into right. Thinking right. And it speaks to the fact
that the action in this case, we're talking about movement,
the actual physical movement changes the way we think yeah,

(22:12):
versus just sitting there trying to feel better and think better.
Sometimes it just doesn't work.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
So my previous book, Override or My Plastic Brain in
the US, was all about trying to think, you know,
trying to do something to my brain to change my
brains workings do you know, to make me less anxious,
to make more creative, to you know, to change various things,
and especially when it came to anxiety. The thing that
bugged me about it is that most of the treatments

(22:38):
revolve around thinking your way out of it, thinking I
feel anxious about this.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
Logically that shouldn't be the case.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
I can tell myself that I don't need to be
anxious about this, and that's not how it works when
you're living it. Yes, you can't think your way out
of it. Of course, there's the issue with things like
depression that getting moving in the first place, Yes, is
a problem. And really interesting research that I found was
one of the first signs that an antidepressant medication is
starting to work is that people have an increase in

(23:05):
voluntary movement, so people want to move more, and then
that starts off the you know, the nice cycle of
upward movement. Hopefully, But yeah, I think it's absolutely true
that if you can get over that barrier and get
yourself moving, then you're.

Speaker 4 (23:20):
You're off and running. And that's been showing time and again.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer to how
to get off the chair in the first place.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
But I know that is a cruel irony of really
severe depression, is that. Yeah, one of the things that
might help you a lot is one of the things
that's very hardest to do, which is, you know why
really learning to start small can be helpful, Like how
you know's what's the littlest thing I can do with
physical activity. Thing I've noticed a lot is that Let's

(23:49):
say I'm thinking, all right, I need to do a
forty five minute bike ride, and my brain thinks about that,
and it thinks about the amount of energy a forty
five minute bike ride takes. It knows what it takes,
it's done it. It's like, okay, that's a lot of energy,
and it compares it to what it feels currently and
it's like that's not doable. Yeah, which is why the
strategy of like all right, Eric, just put on your

(24:10):
bike shoes, get in the other room works. This is
my own sort of interpretation of what I think is
happening in my brain. But my brain is going, oh,
bike shoes, eh, fuck, you know, one unit of energy. Sound,
You've got one unit of energy. I can do it
that way until at some juncture the energy starts to
generate from the workout itself. Yeah, and propels me. So

(24:33):
that strategy has saved me more times than I can count.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
I've been quite slack on the getting out of bed
and doing early morning yoga of late, but I was
regularly getting up at six and going sort of half
an hour down the road and doing an hour and
a half of yoga in the morning. And the way
I managed to do that was when I woke up
and grown. Getting out of bed is my least favorite
thing in the world. I used to say to myself,
tuck and roll.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
I would just.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
Go that's yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Attack and roll hasn't worked for me that well recently,
but now I do go out on a lot of
bike rides with friends, and yeah, having them appear at
the door and say what are you ready tends to
spur me into action. So yeah, it's either pressure from
outside or some sneaky strategy can be the way but
you know, one of the people I met during the
research for the book was Marcus Scottney, who's an ultra
marathon runner who has suffered with depression.

Speaker 4 (25:23):
Is the entire adult life.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
And even he said to me, I just couldn't understand
how can I push myself to run an ultra marathon
over several days when my feats of bleeding and I'm
absolutely exhausted, and yet sometimes I can't get myself out
of this depression. You know, I've clearly got the strength
of mind to do that.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
Why can't I do that?

Speaker 1 (25:43):
So even the best movers struggle with it.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Let's move into talking about some specific types of movement.
So one of the things I loved about this book
is you set it up as globally movement is really
good for us, but then we kind of go through
different types of movement and some of the specific benefits.
So let's talk a little bit about walking. What did
you find most fascinating about the research you did into walking?

Speaker 1 (26:37):
For most people, it's, you know, such an accessible thing
that most people can do. I was surprised at how
it's such a.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Multi use tool.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
So there's the research into creativity, so you know, just
in a brain focused sense. We know that when activity
is turned down in the frontal parts of the brain,
which are a bit behind the forehead, that we tend
to think less in straight lines. You know, that's a
part of the brain that kind of keeps us tethered
and keep pulling us back and says, don't be dark,
that won't work, and you know, keeps us with the

(27:06):
obvious options. And we know that, you know, artificially turning
down activity in that brain region makes you more creative.
We also know that walking does something very similar to
this brain region, and so if you go out at
a sort of a moderate pace where you're not having
to expend much effort, you're just sort of meandering, and
that tends to turn down this thinking bit of the

(27:27):
brain and the brain goes wide and that's been shown
to increase creativity. So we have this idea, I think
in modern society that if we need to work and
come up with something new, we need to sit at
our desks and bang a head against the desk until
we come up with a great idea. But I mean
that's completely not the way we should be doing it.
And science says, go for a walk and go for
a wander, and I think we need to sort of

(27:47):
you know, rebrand working is something that can be done
on the move. So that's one way of using walking
that's really really easy, and it sort of spills over
for about twenty in experiments, like for about twenty minutes
after you come back for the walk, So kep of
brainstorming meeting, go out for a wan to come back,
and you should have better ideas. Another way is that faster,
more brisk walk. So there was some really intriguing research

(28:09):
that I came across. Is this great guy called Dick Green,
who you started off looking at pipeworks in oil fields
and then turned his attention to pipeworker the human body
in or the blood vessels, and it's you know, I
guess it's sort of the same thing, really, And he
found that we essentially have these pressure sensores on our feet,
and when we're putting weight on our feet and walking,
that sort of sets up turbulance in the blood vessels,

(28:30):
which adds up to a boost of blood to the brain.
And I guess that's in a way that's not that surprising.
That's why you feel a bit more alert when you've
been up on your feet and moving. But he found
this sweet spot where our footsteps are at one hundred
and twenty steps per minute, and our heart rate is
also at one hundred and twenty beats per minute, and
our heart rate and our footsteps synchronize, and this gives

(28:53):
you the best boost of blood to the brains, I
think like twenty percent. The even cooler thing about this
is that one hundred and twenty beats per minute. It's
the most common beat in Western pop music. And it's
also sort of this resonant frequency at which if you
just let people walk, that's what they will go to.
And if you get people to tap along to a
beat in a lab, that's also the beat that they

(29:14):
are most accurate at. So there's something magic about this
one hundred and twenty beats per minute. The good thing
about it being common in music, you can google any
of your favorite genre of movement and one hundred and
twenty beats per minute and you can find the music
that you can step in time to and just get going.
And it seems to make you know when your heartbeat
gets into synchrony, that's when you get a boost. So

(29:34):
you know, he doesn't have firm data that this is
what happens and your brain works better. But what he
says is it could really account for this feeling of
well being we get when we're out and moving briskly.
So if you want to not necessarily think broad thoughts,
you want to get out there and after a period
of sitting and getting lethargic, you want to ge yourself

(29:56):
up again and get back in the room, then going
for a very quick stomp is really effective way of
doing that.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
At one hundred and twenty beats per minute. I love that. Yes,
there's another idea in that section on walking that says
our bones are in constant conversation with our brains. What
does that mean? That's an intriguing statement, I know.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Because we tend to think of our bones as being
these sort of dry, dusty sticks that.

Speaker 4 (30:20):
Hold us up and that they don't do very much.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
But in reality, they are a living tissue that's constantly
being built up if we stress them by putting weight
on them, or they get broken down if we're not
putting weight on them, and you know, we start to
lose bone density. And when we're actually building up bone,
there is a hormone released from that bone that goes
into the blood and it doesn't actually have anything to

(30:43):
do with the bone building process. What it seems to
do is travel to the brain. It sort of docks
onto the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which
is important for memory, and it's been shown in experiments
to improve memory and just make the brain function better.
It seems to have an effect on anxiety as well,
So this is all sort of connected again. So when

(31:05):
we're putting on our bones, we're strengthening our bones, We're
making our body more able to move us around away
from danger towards rewards. It's also giving a boost to
our brain to learn better and to retain information better.
To me, that was a really surprising one. But you know,
you think of hormones, you think of glands, you know,
you think of you know, all different kinds of things.
You don't think of your bones as secreting hormones that

(31:26):
help your brain to work properly. But they absolutely do.
So this is really interesting research. Them are now looking
into it in terms of cognitive aging because the bad
news is that when you get to about middle age,
the production of this hormone, osteocalcin drops off, and so
you have to do a lot of weight bearing exercise
to keep that going, which is, you know, that's something

(31:47):
that's very important, especially for women in middle age when
estrogen starts to drop off. It needs to happen anyway,
but this is another reason to keep your bones healthy
and to do that weight bearing exercise. Not only would
you feel better, your brain might work.

Speaker 4 (31:58):
Better as well. So yeah, that was a real surprising
one for me.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
And by weight bearing exercise in this case, we mean
walking walking is a weight bearing exercise.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, I mean anything that's holding up your own weight
against gravity and moving Caunter's weight bearing exercise.

Speaker 4 (32:11):
So we don't know yet.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
It's too early in the research to know whether, you know,
adding ankle weights while you go for a walk, you know,
gives you know more as deer causin or whatever. So
any form of weight bearing exercise. We don't know whether
more is better, but I would probably suspect that more
is better, but I don't have any data to back
that up, so don't quote me on it. But yeah,
I mean, what's the worst that can happen? You can
move better, get stronger, All good things come from that.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
Yeah, it makes me feel like I need to walk more.
My primary cardio exercise is now this peloton bike, which
I love and has been great for my amount of
time I spend doing cardio and a lot of different things.
But it is not, as you say, a weight bearing
exercise in the same way. And the other thing about
it is it's not outdoors.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
Yeah, and then you know there's other stuff.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
This isn't in a book, but I have written about
balance and research. We were working on our balances anohing
that declines with age, and being on a stationary bike
is great for cardio, but if you're on an actual bike,
you're having to fight gravity and you're having to keep
yourself upright. So being on a stationary bike or a
treadmill doesn't tax your brain in quite the same way
as being out in the real world and dodging obstacles

(33:18):
and having to look over your shoulder.

Speaker 4 (33:19):
And that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yep, yeah, you're right that depressed people walk differently than
non depressed people, more slowly, hardly moving their arms and
assuming a slump posture with their eyes to the floor.
I was really struck by that last part, the eyes
to the floor thing. I've been doing something the last
I don't know a month or so. It's called the
Alexander technique. I don't know if you've ever come across it.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, I don't know much about it, but I have
heard of it.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
I don't either still after a month. But part of
what the Alexander Technique is trying to do is to
get you to recognize sort of your habitual patterns of use,
your body being the main one, and undo those by
sort of letting them go. But one of the things
that my Alexander Technique instructor has pointed out to me

(34:04):
is that my natural use is head down slightly looking
more towards the floor. That's sort of where I naturally
orient and as I've started to pay closer attention to that,
I'm like, yeah, even when walking, I'm kind of a
little bit of that head down. So I was struck
by that eyes to the floor piece. You actually talk
about it also in the section about core exercises also

(34:27):
that this is another thing. But I was really struck
by that because, like I said, it was just pointed
out to me this week that I do that.

Speaker 4 (34:33):
Yeah, I do it too.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
I catch myself all the time and I have to
remind myself look up and look out at the world
and you know, head up posture matters. Yeah, and that's
another thing. The sort of the core research is really
interesting and that the effects of just changing the way again,
it's the messages that your body's sending about how you feel.

(34:55):
And you know, we know that slumped posture, you know,
everything from you know, a defeated panzee will sit and
slump down and sort of broadcast the message leave me alone.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
I give up.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
That sort of come through to us as well. But
the benefit of being a human is we can reflect
on that and we can change it, and then we
feedback that. You know, the body then tells the brain, okay,
you're setting up straight. You must be feeling better. And
there's some really interesting research into what causes that. And
I don't know whether your listens will probably know about
Amy Cuddy's power posing research that she got a really

(35:29):
hard time because she then linked changes in postures changes
in hormones in the body.

Speaker 4 (35:33):
That hasn't been backed up by other research.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
But the fact of posture affecting the way you feel
has been backed up many, many, many times. So it
were just still looking for the you know, the killer
mechanism that explains exactly, so, I mean, and there's one
potential one that I go in the book which is
really interesting to me for the same reasons I was
talking about, like thinking your way out of stress, because

(35:56):
there are links that have emerged between like neural links
literally wiring pathways between the adrenal glands that pump out
stress hormones and the parts of the brain that control movements.
So it's like this strip of brain tissue across sort
of way your headphones go across the top of your head,
and these wires from the adrenal glands end up in

(36:18):
the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement of
the core, so the trunk muscles the ones that keep
you upright or not upright, And it's really interesting. There's
something to do with movement. There's something to do with
this movement of this midsection of your body and the
posture that you keep. It's linked in with the stress system.
And so to me, that suggests that rather than having
to think your way out of a stressful situation, there's

(36:39):
something you can do with your body. You can strengthen
that core, you can change your posture, you can take
control and tell yourself via your body that everything's all
right and that you can stand down this stress response.
So to me, I mean, I'm hoping that there's going
to be more research in this area. You know they're
working very hard on it, that will show us exactly
how to do that. But this link, given the we

(37:00):
know that posture makes you feel better, and these links
are there, it would suggest quite strongly that having strong
call a good posture can really effectively change the way
you feel and how you deal with stress.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
So listener and thinking about that and all the other
great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
isolate just one top insider gem that you're taking away,
what would it be. Remember, little by little, a little
becomes a lot. Profound change comes as a result of
tiny actions, not huge efforts. I mentioned earlier that I've

(37:34):
been thinking about relationships and how to improve the quality
of them because they're the quartererstone of our well being.
Thriving connections light up our world, while strained ones can
dim even the brightest days. Too often we face relationship
hurdles alone, feeling lost and powerless. But here's the key.
Building strong relationships isn't just about chance, It's about mastering

(37:56):
specific learnable skills, and here's a quick exercise as you
can do to improve your relationships. Established small daily or
weekly rituals that foster connections, such as shared meals or walks.
Every small effort to connect with a friend or family
member can lead to a deeper or more meaningful relationship.
For example, Chris and I have a weekly ongoing social

(38:17):
night commitment where one week night every week we get
together and do something and having it scheduled just keeps
us connected. So if you found this helpful, this tip
came from this week's newsletter, and you can sign up
for free and get more just like it at Goodwolf
dot me slash Relationships. In that section en Core, you

(38:38):
talk about that neuropathway, but you also say that it's
the area of the body where most of our internal
organs are found, which means it's the point of origin
for a lot of our interroceptive messages that we were
talking about earlier, and so that that area being in
good shape, so to speak, might improve the way we

(39:00):
feel also in that way because the interiorceptive messages.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, and then there's this also idea that you know
this area of the body because the organs are there
so these you know, the messages from the heart and
the lungs. You know, everything is coming from the stomach,
everything's coming from this region that maybe this sort of
is a focal points. So there's one neuroscientist who thinks
that this is why we have this sense of.

Speaker 4 (39:22):
Being in our bodies and looking out.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Of it, because these interceptive messages are in our sort
of core of our body. So there's something special about
our trunk because that's where we are in some ways.
So I think that's a really interesting viewpoint. You know,
a lot of people think, oh, for me is in
my head behind my eyes. Actually, maybe a lot of
me is in my mid section of my body where

(39:44):
all the important stuff. Well the brain's important too, but
you know the other important stuff is there's.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
A lot of other important stuff. Yes, yeah, let's hit
strength training a little bit more. You hit on it
to some degree, But there have been studies that compa
different forms of exercise or they show and you write
about that strength training is faster and more powerful effects
on self esteem.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yeah. Yeah, So this was one of the things that
really surprised me because you know, everyone knows cardio makes
you feel good, gets a blood pumping and doorphins, blah
blah blah. But studies have shown that strength training alone,
regardless of whether you're doing cardio or other forms of exercise,
do lift mood. They help you feel more powerful and
more capable in your life. So and that's one area

(40:31):
that I think is quite easy to neglect. You know,
you can go out and go for a run, you
can go and cycle or swim or whatever, but actually
focusing on your physical strength is something that's easy to
miss and it's really important, and especially in young people,
because there's evidence that young people are less strong than
they were ten years ago, as are a lot of

(40:51):
adults as well, and that you know, maybe that's feeding
into some of the anxiety issues that we're seeing in
young people, and you know that they're they're feeling really
under pressure and able to cope. So you know, giving
them strength at an early age can hopefully give them
some tools to take forward into their adult life and
feel confident and feel that they matter and that they've

(41:13):
got something to offer the world. So it's something that
we're missing out on and I think we could definitely.

Speaker 4 (41:17):
Do better with.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah, the studies that you reference were a little bit
staggering depending on how you measure strength. We're talking about
a twenty to thirty percent decrease in youth since the
year two thousand. That is not very long ago.

Speaker 4 (41:31):
I know, it's kind of terrifying really. You know, I
have a twelve year old and.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
I think, ooh, luckily he's a fidget like I am,
so is always on the move and doing stuff. But yeah,
I mean it's still very easy to go through school
and come out the other end and feel that physical
activity and movement is not for you and you're not
a sporty kid and you're.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
Not very strong, and that's really got to change.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
It's not helpful because those kids then leave and then
they're not the ones who who seek out movement in adulthood.
And you know, and you really have to seek it
out because you haven't got the time anymore like you
did when you were a kid. So I think we
need to do better for children in schools. You know,
we're cutting down on pe time, we're cutting down on
break time, recess time, and kids aren't playing outside like

(42:14):
they used to, they're not walking to school like they
used to. Yeah, there's all kinds of things that they're
not doing that are playing into this and I think
really needs to be urgently looked at.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, and as you said, strength training is one of
the easiest areas to let go. Like I mentioned the
cardio bike that I have sitting next to me here.
I just use it a lot and I love it.
Strength training has proven to be more challenging for me
to do consistently. What's actually worked for me is I
found I've really needed a trainer, someone virtually, and luckily

(42:46):
I'm in a position where I'm able to afford that
from time to time. But yeah, it is. It's a
harder thing for me to motivate myself to do and
to know, like what's the right level, how much should
I be doing? There's more nuance to it.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
Yeah, it's not obvious, is it going for a run,
you know when you're breathless and you know you can
go a bit further than you did last time. It's
a bit tricky, but I mean it doesn't always have
to be using weights and in a gym or you know,
doing anything like that. We can build stuff into our lives.
So I try and make an effort. Now so you
can't see from the screen, but I'm actually really small
on four foot eleven, and I'm quite slight. If I'm

(43:22):
out somewhere and someone say if I'm carrying something and
someone says, can I help me with that, I always
say no, No, I'm fine. You know, I make an effort
to carry things because that's really important that you can
use what strength you have and keep it going. So
it can be as simple as choosing to carry your
shopping home, choosing to lift and carry stuff rather than
putting it in a shopping trolley. You know, we can

(43:43):
build these things into our lives and after a while
they become habits. So that's another way of doing it
for people who aren't necessarily into getting into licra and
lifting weights and don't necessari cause a lot of people don't.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Feel confident that I'm not wearing cra. No, I'm telling you.
I know Chris on the other hand, Chris is now poss.

Speaker 4 (44:06):
Loving the lira. Well he's halfway there.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Then he's wearing likra, but he's not. Yeah, he's halfway there,
but he's not moving really tight like her in this case.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah, I mean, it can also be body weight exercise
as well, because you know, I spend some time with
the movenat community who are interested in using your body
in a sort of human animal kind of way. So
they don't lift weights, they lift boulders. They don't, you know, swim,
They don't go to a swimming pool.

Speaker 4 (44:33):
They might swim in a river, you know.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Things like crawling. I spent a morning crawling in a
park in London. My goodness, I mean I really could
not move the next day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean
it was quite incredible. So it doesn't necessarily have to
be that complicated. And even so, the main change that
I've made to my working life to get more movement
in is rather than sitting at my desk all day,

(44:54):
I spend a lot more time sitting on the floor.
Because the one thing about sitting on the floor you
have to get up and you know, your leg pressing
your entire body weight every time you do that. And
if you're like me and you keep forgetting you've lost
your pen and it's upstairs, you have to run upstairs
to get it up, down, updown. And studies of you know,
people in the blue zones, you may have come across
the places in the world where people are far more

(45:16):
likely to live to one hundred than anywhere else. So
studies of these people, you know, there's lots of factors
that seem to feed into their long lifespan, but one
of them is that they have movement as part of
their everyday life. So these little old ladies in Okinawa
and Japan, they have low tables and they're constantly hopping
up and down from these low tables, and you know,
going out gardening and foraging and bending down and stretching up.

(45:36):
So sort of building that kind of stuff into your
life can actually improve your strength. You know, they call
them movement snacks in Movenat, which I love because it's
a bit like you know, when you're sitting eating snacks,
you know they add up in terms of calories with
that you're really noticing, and you know that can have
a real physical effect. It's the same for movement snacks.
They add up over time. You don't notice that you're

(45:57):
hopping up and down from the floor, but you're still
your legs, you're still improving your overall strength.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
So it all counts. And the less you're doing in
the first place.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
The more a small amount will have an impact. So
it doesn't have to be going out and becoming Ronie
and getting really big, bolding muscles.

Speaker 4 (46:13):
And in fact, that's the other thing about strength training.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
The improvements in mental health and in feeling more confident
and powerful, they happened before any physical changes were detectable
in the muscles. So it's not even that you have
to build more muscle, it's just letting your body know
that you can do it and that the strength is there,
and it sort of releases a bit of latent potential
that you didn't necessarily know you had. So yeah, you

(46:37):
don't need to get buff, that's not necessary at all.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
All right, dance, let's talk about dance. Of all the
exercises that we've talked about, probably the least number of
listeners are doing.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah, yeah, very very few people dance. When we get
to adulthood, we seem to stop dancing, which is a
real shame and it's a really fundamental part of what
it means to be human. So no other creatures dance,
or if they do, they're dancing a different rhythm that
we can't work out. But they don't dance like we do,
to the beats, the one hundred and twenty beats per
minute like we do.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
And there are lots of theories about why.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
That is that humans are dancers, and one of the
things is that it helps us bond you know, this
whole point of needing each other and needing to be
socially bonded. Dance is a way of bringing it together.
And so the idea behind this is that when we're moving,
you know, we have these appropriate receptive inputs. So that's
slightly different to interception. It's the bodily sense of where

(47:52):
our body is in space without having to look, and
that's an important thing of knowing who I am and
where I end and you begin. So when we're moving,
we have this appropriate sceptive sense of where our body
is in space. If we're moving in synchrony with somebody else,
then the information about their body movements coming in through
our other senses, our brains get confused. They can't really

(48:13):
separate the two, and so this sort of breaks down
the barrier between me and you and we start to
feel more connected. And there's all these intriguing experiments where
they get people to move in time together, and then
they get them to do kind of gambling tasks and
they can either stuff each other's chances of winning, or
they can cooperate and everyone goes home happier, and people
are far more likely to cooperate with each other when
they've moved together first. So there's something about being a human,

(48:37):
caring about other humans, feeling connected that moving together just
makes happen naturally. So, yeah, it can be embarrassing to
dance with other people, but it doesn't have to be danced.

Speaker 4 (48:47):
It could be yoga, it could be tai chi, it
could be an.

Speaker 1 (48:49):
Aerobics class, you know, it could be all kinds of
ways moving in synchrony with other people. But it's something
I think we're missing out on definitely, and you can
actually get the same effect on your own. So I
spoke to this scientists called Peter Jinatta who he works
on the psychology of the groove, which is, you know,
getting into the groove of music and feeling that you
can't help but move your body to it. And he

(49:10):
says that when you're listening to music that's made by
other humans moving their bodies, that's how the sound is
getting creative. You're moving along with that. It's kind of
like an invitation to join in with the band. And
so you're moving to the movements of other people and
you can still get this sort of sense that you're
part of something bigger than yourself. So even dancing alone
in your kitchen, which I do quite a lot of,

(49:33):
can help you feel connected to other people in society.
So that's, to me, is the most important reason to
sort of get over ourselves and dance a little bit more.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
In this Science of the Groove, he surveyed a wide
number of people about the groovous song and regardless of
their musical interests, one song kind of came out head
and shoulders above the rest. What was it? Let's give
the listeners a second to guess. You guess, listeners, Yeah,
I guess think is the most groovyous song. I'll tell

(50:02):
you it is not. Groover is in the Heart by Dlight.
So you can take that one off your list. Even
though it's pretty groovy.

Speaker 4 (50:08):
It's probably up there are though.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah it might be all right. Now you can tell us.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Okay, okay, I think everyone who ever heard this will
get it immediately. It's superstition by Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 4 (50:18):
And the reason why maybe is.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Because it's got this syncopated beat, so you're not just
stomping along to the beat, which does do something amazing
to us if we sort of we feel connected to
the beat, we feel empowered that we're going along to it,
and we get this boost of dopamine.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
We feel good.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
But the syncopated beat, it's sort of like a secret rhythm.
We can decode it and then we can sort of
roll our hips and move their arms around and then
you kind of feel groovy.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
I mean, it's an.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Outdated word, but we're bringing it back for neuroscience. And
one idea about you know, why this makes us feel
good is that there are the balance organs of our
inner ear are connected to the limbic system, which is
the brains sort of emotional control sensors. So when we're
sort of dancing, we're sort of almost falling and catching ourselves,

(51:02):
and the syncobated beat gives us this.

Speaker 4 (51:04):
It's a bit like, you know, in.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
The same way a joke makes us laugh because it
sets up expectations and it violates it, and it pulls
out the rug from under our feet and we laugh
because it's funny. The same sort of thing happens when
we're trying to follow a syncubated beat. We're almost falling
over and we catch ourselves and we feel good. And
so we have this kind of lovely feeling that we
just feel amazing, and that's why we can't help but
move our bodies to it.

Speaker 4 (51:24):
So I love that.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
I can't resist superstition that was playing a lot in
my university years and gets me grooving every time.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
So yeah, dancing is good. I've taken up the occasion
or just putting on a song. And you might call
what I'm doing jumping around more than dancing, perhaps my
old punk rock day is, but hey, you know it
does work.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
That works the sensitivity of the kind of gravity detectors
in our ears. They're very sensitive to up and down movement.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
So that's why, you.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
Know, especially when it's loud, there's this thing called the
rock and roll threshold where when the music is above
this threshold, I think it's one hundred and twenty decipell.
I could be remembering it wrong, but anyway, when it's
loud enough, people start moving. They can't help but Bob
and you know, even if it's just a stomp of
the feet and a back to the head, you can't
help it. And so you know, sort of poe going along.
It's a sort of dancing that you could do anywhere

(52:10):
in the world if someone was drumming and you wouldn't
look dark. It's a kind of you know the toddlers
do when they first start moving with the beat before
they realized they're supposed to be embarrassed and they're supposed
to not do that, you know, stomping around and you know,
bashing the air with your fists. It makes you feel good,
so yeah, you can do it by yourself. It's okay,
and it still works. I actually had the most embarrassing

(52:32):
experience joining in with a reformed dance group that I
went to sort of as part of my research, and
it was pretty embarrassing the whole thing.

Speaker 4 (52:40):
When we were wafting around, you.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
Know, just moving your body wants to and I was like,
my body doesn't want to move, my body wants to
go home.

Speaker 4 (52:47):
This is awful.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
But when the beats got going and you know, the
whole room was just stomping along, it was amazing. And
by the end of it, I had this sense that
I wasn't moving my legs in arms, they were moving me.
I was just along for the ride and it was
just this amazing feeling. I was on a total high
for days afterwards. And you know, this was how we
got out of our minds and just enjoyed being rather

(53:09):
than thinking.

Speaker 4 (53:10):
Before.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
You know, we invented other ways of getting out of
our minds and.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
It works and it's free and you can do it and.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
You can still drive home afterwards. So yeah, it was
a bit of an eye opener for me.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
I have to say, I did a conscious movement freeform
movement class virtually and.

Speaker 4 (53:25):
Did you keep your camera on?

Speaker 3 (53:27):
Yeah, yeah we did, and my partner was here with me,
and yeah, that's a strange experience, you know, like, just
move in the way your body wants to move like you.
I was, like, my body wants to hide in a
chair in the corner the minute you've suggested this, yes exactly.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
Don't know's my body it has no idea.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
Yeah, but yeah, over time I began to unwind a
little bit and enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
I mean I sort of had a word with myself
because I was hanging onto the radiator in the corner
of this sort of drafty village hall and I thought,
you know, seriously, the only way you're going to look
ridiculous in this situation is to stand there and not
do anything. These people don't know you. I mean, I
had a quite a few friends that said, I'll come
with you.

Speaker 4 (54:03):
That sounds funny.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
I'm like, no, absolutely exactly, on my that's what I
was saying. My partner here in the house with me
almost made it worse. You know, it would have been
easier with a group of strangers. You did another of
the things that I suspect would be really great, But
watching it from the outside, it looks painful to even
be a part of, which is laughter yoga.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yeah, it even gives me a nervous laughter just even
thinking about it. But but I mean, the reason for
doing laughter yoga is that studies suggest that laughing, a
proper belly laugh is a better workout for your abs,
for your core than crunches. So I mean, ideally you
would have friends that make you absolutely crack up a lot,

(54:52):
you know, may make your belly sore at the end
of it. But if not, then laughter yoga is another
way of going about it.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
But yeah, but you still look skeptical. Yeah, I don't
get the sense you're going back.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
No, No, I don't really think that is my thing.
And luckily I have very funny friends and a funny
husband and a funny child. And a dog that I
could either laugh or cry at most of the time
because he's such a ridiculous to animal.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
But what kind of dog and how I got to ask?
We've talked about him twice.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
Yeah, he is a colleague crossed with a New Zealand
hunter away, which is basically they took Welsh colleagues to
New Zealand and thought we need a bigger dog that
can be more demanding. It can run up mountains and
it can bark at the top of its lungs for
fourteen hours straight, so he's quite demanding.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (55:35):
Yeah, I don't know what I do know what I
was thinking.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
I was thinking I want a dog and I like colleagues,
and I didn't really read up enough about hunter ways.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
I don't recommend it unless you really want to run
up and down hills. But he's great.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
He gives you a great character, he gives me moving
and you know, there's really no option if you've got someone.
He doesn't do what my previous dog did, which is
just come and stare at you until you take him
out for a walk.

Speaker 4 (55:56):
You can ignore a stare.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
He will come and literally bark in your face and
you go fine, Fine, I'll take you out. So, yeah,
it's not negotiable for him at all.

Speaker 4 (56:04):
And seeing him.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
You know, I was saying before about you know, if
other animals dance, maybe we just can't tune into it.
When he cuts together with the other herding breeze, it's
like they click in to each other. Right, Okay, you
go on the inside, a go on the outside, and
you just run in circles and it's like the form
of dance and you can see that they just feel
amazing when they're doing it.

Speaker 4 (56:21):
So maybe we just can't tune in.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
I've had MutS in the past that have a significant
amount of Collie in them. The hrding instinct is fascinating
to watch in them.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
Yeah, it's very strange, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
Yeah. I have a Boston Terrier. She's old, but she's
still active and she does I call it her ball
or her bone dance. She loves her ball and sometimes
she loves a bone and basically she just gets on
her back and rolls like I mean, she doesn't roll,
She gets on her back in wiggles on top of
this thing she loves, just over and over and over

(56:53):
and over again. I mean it looks to all the
world like she is dancing.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Yeah, we call it doggie break dancing. Yeah, Jango does
that too. My dog does that too. That's like the
bit of breakdancing.

Speaker 4 (57:02):
And he usually teams it with a so it's like
you're singing and dancing when he's doing it. You have
to be a mad dog person to understand.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
I know, I know, we're gonna have to pivot here
so that we don't turn this entire show into dogs.
Stretching is another part of the book, another type of movement,
so I want to make sure people get all of them.
We've got walking, strength training, dance, the core, stretching. But
where we're going to end is breath control. I've been
very interested in breath work over the last year. We

(57:31):
had James nestor On who wrote a great book about
the breath. But you brought up some really great things
there also, and I wanted to start with meditation, and
the most common style of meditation probably is to sit
and just follow your breath, don't control it, just follow
it and observe it. But you talk about how a

(57:53):
scientist or two got interested in, Hey, what's happening in
the benefits of medica? Is it something to do with
what's being done with the mind or is it something
to do with what's being done with the breath? Can
you share a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Yes, this was sort of trying to tease apart whether
it's the act of mentally focusing on the breath that
gives you these sort of changes in brain function and
the way that you feel, or whether it's something to
do with the breathing. And it's really interesting that the
actual act of breathing through your nose, in and out
through your nose, what you're basically doing is harnessing your

(58:28):
brain waves and sort of taking their rhythm under control,
which sounds completely out there, but it kind of makes
sense when you think about the way that the brain works.
And again, it's all about getting information from your environment
and then using that sensibly to improve your chances of survival. So,
when you're taking in breath through your nose, there's a
lot of information about the environment, how safe a rewarding

(58:50):
it is in that and so this information goes through
the olfactory cortex, which is sort of the top of
the nose, and then to make use of that information,
what you then need to do is to get other
brain areas, so the bits that are to do with
memory to make sense of what this information means, and
then emotional responses.

Speaker 4 (59:08):
You know, does this make me scared, does this make
me happy? Whatever?

Speaker 1 (59:12):
And for all those different brain regions to talk to
each other, they need to be on the same brainwave frequency.
And so as a result of that working of the brain,
when we breathe in and out through our nose, the
whole brain starts to synchronize and beat to the same rhythm.
And when we slow down our breathing that has effects
of slowing down brainwaves that they propagate through the brain.

(59:34):
So even as I'm saying this, it sounds so far fetched,
but this is what studies are showing with EG, which
is looking at the frequency of brainwaves across the brain
and so when you really really slow it down. So
this particular experiment was looking at when you slow your
breath down to three breaths per minute. So that's really
quite difficult to keep up. In fact, in the study,

(59:54):
a few of the volunteers actually fell asleep during the
study because they were so relaxed it off. But that
can sort of take you into this altered state of
consciousness where you are more in a sense of being
rather than thinking. You know, I'm not big on sitting around.
This explains why all these expert meditators commit to all

(01:00:16):
this sitting around and breathing slowly and can actually do
this for this long because it takes you to this
amazing state of just being and being at one of
the universe. I haven't managed it myself, but it seems
worth aiming for. To me, I would definitely fall asleep.
Sleeping is like my thing. I can definitely fall asleep anywhere,
but at different rates. You know, six breaths per minute

(01:00:38):
is a lot easier to do, and that's if you
get people to breathe at different rates. The one that
they tend to say that was the most comfortable and
relaxing is six breaths per minute. And interestingly, in studies
of things like chanting, reciting the Rosary in Latin, sort
of these sort of prayer based practices, studies of those
have found that it tends to naturally make people's breath

(01:01:00):
go to six breaths per minute. So it's almost like
humanity's worked out that this is how you feel good,
This is how you feel calm and held and looked
after so breathing its six breaths per.

Speaker 4 (01:01:10):
Minute has all kinds of benefits.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
It fills your lungs more effectively, it activates the vegus nerve,
which calms the whole nervous system down. And so it's
just this very easy. I mean, it doesn't even feature
when you think about movement, but this is a voluntary
movement that our species can do and not many others can,
to sort of override just the in and out of
oxygen into our bodies and to take control and that

(01:01:32):
can change the way that we feel. And it's such
a simple thing. You don't have to be fit, you
don't have to be strong, you don't have to be able.
Anyone can do it. It's a really really important thing
to do, and we don't know yet how important it
is or whether it makes any difference if you do
that breathing whilst moving.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
So I find that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
When I'm breathing and moving, that's how I get myself
into that kind of calm state, is by doing yoga
and focusing on breathing. But it means that there is
a small amount of evidence that it might be even
more effective if you're moving and breathing at calm right
at the same time, so you maybe hit more of
these buttons. You get the core exercise, you get, the strength,

(01:02:12):
you get, the breathing, you get, the stretching, all of
these things in one. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
It's one of the things about yoga that when I
take it in a class that I wish is that
it would slow down, you know, because you're moving on
the in and the out breath. You know, is that
the movement would span a longer breath more to that,
you know, five in five out count, which is that's
what six breass per minute works out to, right, Five
on the inhale, five on the exhale.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
So the kind of yoga that I really fell in
love with so about ten years ago more than that
now is ashtanga. And you don't follow the.

Speaker 4 (01:02:44):
Instructor to do your own pace, right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
You do your own pace. And that's when it really
clicked for me that I wasn't breathing now, breathe out now,
It's like, well, how do you know when my lungs
are full? You know? But if you're doing it at
your own pace, you can really you can really feel
it when you get going. I have got into that
state of being and just calm and awareness of my body,
and it's an amazing feeling. And you don't necessarily get

(01:03:06):
that if somebody's dictating your breath, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
That's right. Yeah, yeah, I always find that. I'm like,
the speed is off for me.

Speaker 4 (01:03:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
I found the six breast per minute. I think certain
people call it coherent breathing. Fascinating that that is the
rate that ties to a lot of ancient prayer type practices.
And then three breasts per minute does take a little
bit of effort, but it's interesting. I'm practicing a little
bit differently now, but for a while I was a
very focused Zen Buddhist, so I was really doing that

(01:03:36):
type of meditation. But if you go back further into
the Zen tradition, there is talk about controlling your breath
in a way that doesn't typically show up in what
we think about with meditation, and it was about this
very light so you're not moving a lot of air,
but you're doing it, you know, closer to what you're describing,

(01:03:59):
which is that at you know, three breasts per minute.

Speaker 4 (01:04:02):
That's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
So yeah, you don't have to be sort of huffing
and puffing and making real effort, but what you're doing
is sort of taking control and sort of controlling the rate.
The research we suggest that what you're doing is really
sort of slowing down the activity of the brain, and
then that can get you into the state of zen
I guess, you know, the state of being and being
at one with the universe.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
Yeah. And I think that's what makes slow breathing hard
for a lot of people is we tend to equate
slow breathing with deep breathing, which we then sort of
naturally equate with moving a lot of air. So there's
this like, you know this strong you can't inhale that
forcefully for ten seconds, Like it didn't work that way.
It's a much lighter, moving less air h long that

(01:04:45):
period of time. So, listeners, what resonated for you while
listening to that? What came up for you when thinking
about how you could be feeding your good wolf? This month?
When I think about feeding my good wolf, I've been
thinking a lot about relationships. Relationships really shape the quality
of our lives in profound ways. When they're healthy, they
bring joy and fulfillment, but when they're struggling, the impact

(01:05:08):
can be deeply unsettling. It's a common struggle but one
that often goes unaddressed. The good news there are concrete
skills we can learn to improve our relationships. Relationships are
this month's theme and our weekly Bite of Wisdom for
a Wiser, Happier You newsletter, and I'd love to send
them your way. Every week we send a menu of

(01:05:29):
a few small exercises you can put into practice to
feed your good wolf, along with the reflection and a
related podcast episode on the topic. If you want to
go deeper, just head to Goodwolf dot me slash relationships.
If you think you'd benefit from these useful reminders and
small bite size exercises to help you feed your good wolf,
I'd love to send them to you for free. Just

(01:05:51):
head over to Goodwolf dot me, slash relationships and I'll
send them your way. Thank you so much, Caroline for
coming on the show. Thank you so much for this
wonderful book that teaches us so much about how to move.
And you've just got a line which is basically the
messages move more in your brain will thank you in
the long run and in the short.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
Run absolutely yeah, yeah, your life will be better. Yeah,
I mean, what's the worst that can happen?

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
You've moved you get healthier, You've.

Speaker 4 (01:06:20):
Had a good time. Yeah, you can always sit down afterwards.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
And you know, at the end of the book, I
talk about rest and the importance of rest. It's not
about necessarily getting more exercise in It's about moving your
body around more and it doesn't have to hurt. You
don't even have to change your clothes and shoes. You
just have to remember that you're an animal that needs
to move and stretch and breathe.

Speaker 4 (01:06:39):
And make sure you do that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:06:40):
Thank you so much, Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 (01:06:42):
For having me. It's been lovely to talk to you.
I think I've led a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
To Thank you so much for listening to the show.
If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking,
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(01:07:06):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Move Your Body, Free Your Mind: The Science of Movement and Mental Health with Caroline Williams