The monday mindset you need
Good morning everybody. It's day one of week two. Another way of saying that is day eight. It's week two, day one. God knows.
Speaker 1:Hey, it's week two. I'm, recording this from I'm currently walking to a forest in Amsterdam. I have no idea where I'm going so let's hope I survive this trip. All the trees have fallen down from the winds so I imagine the winds must have been very strong to blow all these trees down. But today I want to kind of go through two or three quotes from a book, The Body Keeps a Score.
Speaker 1:It's a book that covers a lot of stuff like emotional regulation stuff, it does cover trauma as well obviously but it's a lot about how being in tune with our body and how it goes body up to the mind, mind down to the body. You can't just be doing mindfulness stuff without looking at the body as well and understanding how that all connects. I'm going cover three quotes now but first I want to mention is obviously weekends are the toughest part for people on a health and fitness journey, especially when the goal is fat loss because we're more social on the weekends typically. We go out, we have ice cream here, there, the sun is out, you have a drink, all that type of stuff. Most of the time people have no idea what they consumed because it's like just enjoying yourself.
Speaker 1:And, you just gotta remember that when it comes to Monday, there literally is only two options. You can either sulk about the weekend and feel like a failure about it, or you can just as soon as you hear this podcast today just crack on with your one big thing. Like just do a workout, go for a walk, get your food ready, do something, go on your phone to track, it's not hard, literally easy. You're on your phone three, four hours a day on average most people, there's no excuse to be able to get back on track right now. It's like the easiest way to get back on track.
Speaker 1:So I don't want any of you to start feeling like pity parties over the weekend, like yeah, you might not be an ideal, but you go again now Monday to Friday and then as each weekend comes it depends on your plans. If you've got loads of stuff planned you might find it hard to kind of stay within your calorie target. Some weekends you'll be very very there won't be anything going on and then it's easy. And then you think okay I'll need prep on this Sunday, got more time, I'll need prep for the week. So you take them as they come and then obviously the busier ones you kind of accept hey this is life, I don't want to be in my deathbed thinking oh my god I'm grateful that I skipped all those plans or overly worried about gaining a pound or two of fat over the year because I had so many plans going on.
Speaker 1:Come on, let's not be like that. That's not what health is to me. Health isn't obsessing about fat levels. Even though a lot of us listening want to get leaner and stuff like that, it's just how we are. We're going to look better, don't we?
Speaker 1:Simple humans wouldn't look better, we wouldn't feel confident, want to maximize our potential in life. We feel like it all kind of encompasses being fit in the mind, fit in the body, looking after ourselves, eating to feel good as well. Like I they're basically fries over Europe, they're like frits or whatever, like they're kind of distinct style like Belgian fries. And I had some of those fries and like got my stomach killing me. Honestly, absolute agony.
Speaker 1:And I think I was thinking eating isn't just about like the calories and macros, how I'm feeling after I eat the things. Like I don't want to feel like this even though it was nice. I just don't want to feel the gaskets. It's ruining for like two hours my stomach was killing me. So like two hours of time that it ruined because I went for something that didn't agree with me so I won't eat them again.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure a lot of you know foods that you don't agree with. Yeah, crack on, get your one big thing done, have a think about that now and let me just give you three quarts, okay, that I want you to think about today. So the first one is the neuroscientist Joseph Leddukes and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self awareness, I. E. By activating the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we're feeling.
Speaker 1:The technical term for this is interception, Latin for looking inside. Most of our conscious brain is dedicated to focusing on the outside world, getting along with others and making plans for the future. However, that does not help us manage ourselves. Okay? So we're never here.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? We're never here right now. We're always in the future of the past. If you think about it for a second, and there's another quote about that that I need to find. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 1:Montaigne's quote: We are never present with but always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope still push us towards the future, depriving us in the meantime of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the thought of what we shall what shall be even when we shall not be no when we shall be no more. You know, how hard does I quote it? Like, whenever here right now, think with fears and desires and hope, that's in the future depriving us of now and we're even fearing desire and hope over stuff beyond when maybe we're not even alive. We're stripping ourselves of actual life not being here right now.
Speaker 1:And this is like from the book, this quote by the Neuroscientists, it's like how do you expect to regain or like to feel a sense of control in your life if you're always looking at what you should have done yesterday or what you need to do next week or how much weight you've got to lose. You're here now, that's the only thing that exists, the infinite now. You know, this is the Buddhist, the Buddhala, these people have discovered this, not discovered it, realised the truth of this a long time ago, and I feel like we've we refuse to look look at it, we're like, how do you plan for the future if you live one day at a time? Well of course you can still plan for the future but your actions and consciousness and state of being are here now. Like if you think about yourself right now, you know where you are, if you're walking, the trees around you, the noise, you know the air, how cold you are, you're breathing, you know that's why in Buddhist meditation and breath work it's all about the breath, because you can always bring the breath, you can always focus on the breath which is really focusing on the body and something that you can go into at any time of the day and that's why it's such an important part of Buddhist meditation.
Speaker 1:I feel like listening in on this now, it's like kind of like realising I want you all to start maybe do an exercise today where after this podcast and you kind of write down your one big thing to do today and you actually get cracking on it, don't feel self pity, just see where your mind is going and you just see it jumping like all the weekend or next weekend the holiday go see what it's jumping and see how that does literally take you away from now. Some days you just go through a day and you don't even know what you've done that day. Like you know like the secret details and stuff like that, people are just like blowing through each day like a gust of wind of no clear what's going on and hoping for the weekend, hoping for the day to end. But your day, your life is the day today. It might sound woo woo to some people but when I realised this, I can't remember when it was, it might have been when I read The Power of Now years ago that I was really starting to think about this stuff.
Speaker 1:We think the mundane stuff in our lives are so boring, just get them over with and let's just get to the big stuff. Small stuff is what we love when we think back. It's like the walks in nature, you know, like reading or sitting down, relaxing in the sun. Like we love sunbathing, we just love sitting on the grass with friends talking, know, just having a laugh, love just being somewhere. We don't need much, but we think we need the big things all the time.
Speaker 1:So today is the only day. Think about that. Okay, two more and then I'm going let you crack on with your day because I know we all need to go and crack on with our day and give a week a big boost of, action because motivation comes after action, not the other way around. Okay. So this one's talking about deep dealing with hyperarousal.
Speaker 1:Over the past few decades, mainstream, psychiatry has focused on using drugs to change the way we feel, and this has become the accepted way to deal with hyper and hyperarousal hyper and hypoarousal. I will discuss drugs later in the chapter, but first I need to stress the fact that we have lost we have a host of inbuilt skills to keep us on an even keel. In chapter five, we saw how emotions are registered in the body. Some 80% of the fibers of the vagus nerve, which connects the brain with many internal organs, are afferent, that is, they run from the body into the brain. This means that we can directly train our arousal system by the way we breathe, chant, and move, a principle that has been utilized since time immemorial in places like China and India and in every religious practice that I know of, but that is suspiciously eyed as alternative in mainstream culture.
Speaker 1:In research supported by the National Institute of Health, my colleagues and I have shown that ten weeks of yoga practice markedly reduced the PTSD symptoms of patients who had failed to make progress. And then the third quote. Since emotional regulation is the critical issue in managing the effects of trauma and neglect, it would make an enormous difference if teachers, army sergeants, foster parents, and mental health professionals were thoroughly schooled in emotional regulation techniques. Right now, this still is mainly the domain of preschool and kindergarten teachers who deal with immature brains and impulsive behavior on a daily basis and who are often very adept at managing them. Mainstream Western psychiatry and psychological healing traditions have paid scant attention to self management.
Speaker 1:In contrast to the Western reliance on drugs and verbal therapies, other traditions from around the world rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms, and action. Yoga in India, tai chi in China, and rhythmical drumming throughout Africa are just a few examples. The culture of Japan and the Korean Peninsula have spawned martial arts which focus on the cultivation of purposeful movements and being centered in the present, abilities that are damaged in traumatized individuals, real again, which focus on the cultivation of purposeful move movement and being centered in the present. Right? Essential.
Speaker 1:Abilities that are being that abilities that are damaged in traumatized individuals. Aikido, judo, taekwondo, kendo, and jujitsu, as well as kapo kapouria kapouria kapouria from Brazil are examples. These techniques all involve physical movement, breathing and meditation. Aside from yoga, a few of these popular non Western healing traditions have been systematically studied for the treatment of PTSD. Okay, so the importance of moving the body, training it, getting in tune.
Speaker 1:So when I when and this is also a massive reminder to me. When we're training, sometimes I just want to get the workout done, sometimes I want to get over with, and sometimes doing something is better than nothing. But we really do want to start being in tune with our body, breathing. We want to start doing the movements properly, we want to start being able to move. We offer yoga, guys on this challenge, you've got pilates as well, you've got Jaws body flow, well that's a kind of meditation type thing, you've got to get into a flow, your body's got to move, get into a rhythm, it's kind of like, again like that flow state and you've got pilates and yoga, then you've got like the sweat and shred with some more high intensity, you've got the running which a lot of people say is meditation for them as well.
Speaker 1:So it's of vital importance that we find a physical thing that gets us to go into this state of being able to be very centered and now with our body and you know this is clear as day through the research in his book he talks about all this type of stuff and sometimes we don't realise that yes the mind is really really important to work on and it helps with the body to relax it But at the same time when you get a stress response, you get very anxious, body is very tight and needing to do something, you you feel like on edge, one of the best things you can do is go and tune into that, go and do some activity start feeling getting and inside the body more using that frontal cortex and to breathe in, look inside, go for a walk, for a run, do a gym session, start really, you know, sometimes even without music, just like really focusing on yourself, being quiet, just looking without looking in world without insulting yourself, without being very judgmental, without hating what's going on, like they win it all and doing some movement is going to help a lot.
Speaker 1:Okay? So I don't know where all of you are at in your lives. I know there's things that come and go in people's lives, stressful things out of nowhere, and sometimes they hit you like a train, and it's sometimes they overwhelm us. There's nothing worse for you to do than just sit down being idle and thinking about the future and what happened and just wishing it was different. You get up, you do some movement, you look inside, you can do some breath work.
Speaker 1:We've got some breath work in the app as well by Phoebe, unbelievable breath work classes. I'm going to go back and do the box breathing one and the nostril, alternative nostril one, which I find really great for like the alternative nostril one and the breath work one and the app is awesome. Makes it like after you do it, you feel so much more space around your head. It's weird to explain. Just feel like there's a lot more room around you.
Speaker 1:Even if you're in a very spacious room, just feel a lot more, yeah, less tight around the nose and face. So do something good for your body today, definitely. Try and be present right now and write down things you want to do successful today. And that's the best way to start Monday no matter what happened on the weekend. So have a good one on evening radio tonight.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about this type of stuff, anxiety, kind of self confidence maybe and maybe all this type of mindfulness stuff and I think I ideally want to hear from as many of you as possible what works for you as opposed to like sharing more like studies and research. Think people want to see what other people are doing day to day. If you can join that chat later on it'll be awesome and I'll see you there. Have a good day, get you one big thing done and I'll see you soon.
