David Hamilton: For most of the stressful situations in our lives, it's our perception of a situation more than the situation itself. But turn that around and what about its opposite? Physiologically, the opposite of stress is kindness. It's how kindness feels. Some psychologists refer to it as elevation. Kindness feels like an elevated state. You help someone, it feels satisfying and it feels nice. If you observe an act of kindness, sometimes you feel moved or inspired. But globally, those are referred to similarly as elevation.
Intro/Outro: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. The show about food, lifestyle, medicine, and how to improve your health today. My name is Dr Rupy, I'm a medical doctor, I also study nutrition, and I'm a firm believer in the power of food and lifestyle as medicine. Join me on this podcast where we explore multiple determinants of what allows you to live your best life. And remember, you can sign up to thedoctorskitchen.com for the newsletter where we give weekly recipes plus tips and hacks on how to improve your lifestyle today.
Dr Rupy Aujla: My guest today is David Hamilton, PhD. He is a writer, columnist, speaker and author of 10 books covering the science of kindness, self-esteem, and the mind-body connection. He is pretty much the kindness tsar and has been featured on Channel 4's Sunday Brunch Live in the UK and CBS Sunday Morning in the US. And on today's podcast, we talk broadly about the subjects of kindness, self-esteem and mind-body medicine, as well as his personal journey from organic chemist at a well-known pharmaceutical company to now having the courage and confidence to preach what he practises. We have a really down-to-earth, authentic conversation. Perhaps the second part of the conversation is my favourite because we really dive into what he's thinking about doing next and how that's conjuring up a bit of nervous energy which hopefully will be converted into something positive. But earlier on we talk about the placebo effect, how to cultivate inner self-confidence and esteem, manifesting physical changes in the body with brain visualisation and mental exercises, something that I probably would have scoffed at about five or six years ago, but now I'm really understanding a lot more about the research and the science behind. We talk about the antidote to stress hormones and the kindness hormone, oxytocin, the virality of kindness, the difference between toxic positivity and actually empathising when in a bad situation, as well as kindness and positivity as a muscle that needs to be worked out. You can find my guest at www.drdavidhamilton.com and also check out the links, all of which are on the show notes, thedoctorskitchen.com/podcast. And check out some of the visuals that we put on social media as well, some little soundbites that I think really resonated with myself. But for now, it's a bit of a long podcast. I hope you enjoy it and I will sum up some of the most impactful tips that David gave me that I'm personally going to be putting into practice at the end of the show. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, David, because this is a subject I don't think I've typically paid enough attention to over the years. My primary focus has obviously been medicine that I've been practising for the last 10 years, coupled with nutrition and lifestyle. And the sort of the clinical research behind the ingredients and recipes and how that pertains to physiological changes in the body. But I was really interested to hear about a) your background in organic chemistry and pharmaceuticals initially and how you've transitioned the whole way along to what you practise now, which is all about kindness, self-love and gratitude. And actually to be fair to myself, I did practise, I still practise gratitude and I have done for a number of years where I share three things I'm grateful for every single day for I think it was almost three years on social media. But I'd love to for you to take us on that journey of how you got to what you're doing right now.
David Hamilton: Well, at university I did chemistry, I specialised in biological and medicinal chemistry in my my my honours year. And then I did my PhD was organic chemistry. And then I went to work with AstraZeneca. And I was an organic chemist there. But what intrigued me, I was working really in drug development, so I had a very broad role, that spanned, it was in some ways a kind of chemistry-stroke-communication role. It was a new type of role that they'd created in AstraZeneca the previous year to I joined, that spanned a number of different areas. And it needed organic chemists who could speak the language of people doing hard lab chemistry, but it could also speak the language of people developing the medicines and and really spanned the area. The idea being to speed up the rate that things are done. So that job exposed me to clinical trial data that I maybe wouldn't have seen in a slightly different role. And I found that fascinating because as well as, I loved the science, I loved the building of the drugs and I loved the whole formulation side of it, all of that kind of stuff and the analytical side of it. But once I saw the results of the clinical trials, that just, the idea of the placebo effect that people could be improving because they believe that this sugar pill, i.e. the placebo, the sugar pill, was going to help them. And so people would show some improvement. And I think the roots of my fascination with that was because my mum when I was young had postnatal depression or postpartum depression after my youngest sister was born. So my youngest sister was born in the mid-70s. And I remember I'd just, my mum had been ill on and off but as a child you don't know why. My mum didn't really tell us too much about it. Obviously she's trying to protect us, there was four children really. And I remember I was I knew my mum was sick and I wanted to help her. And the English teacher had taken us to the library when we I'd just started high school and I was 11 years old. And this is going to sound really corny, but a book fell off the shelf. Now I might have bumped it with my bag or something, but it's called 'The Magic Power of Your Mind' by a gentleman called Walter Germain. And I had this instinct, I bet that can help my mum. And so I just put it in my bag and took it. I didn't know you're supposed to join a library and a wee yellow card. First time I'd been in one. So I put it in my bag. I thought, that's great. I'll borrow that. And my mum, we've still got it by the way. Forgot to take it back. Because it was so, my mum devoured it. It didn't cure depression, of course, but what it did is it taught her strategies like what we now call meditation, mindfulness and gratitude. And it taught her things like that that could help her to navigate a course through some of the difficult times. And it certainly made an improvement for my mum. So one of the things she did was affirmations and she used to pump her fist and go, it's all in the mind, mind over matter, I can do it kind of thing. And that was an energising body language kind of thing that she did. And so wind the clock forward, and my mum and I had all these conversations about the mind while I was growing up as a teenager then in my early 20s. So wind the clock forward, here I am working with AstraZeneca and I'm looking at clinical trial data. And all my friends and colleagues are so excited that this cardiovascular drug, I worked mostly cardiovascular, a little bit of cancer as well. And they're looking at this cardiovascular blood pressure lowering drug and they're thinking, wow, look how great it is. And all I can see is how many people have improved in the placebo. And I wanted to know why. So I in my spare time, I began to research and investigate, what is that bridge between your thinking and your believing and your feeling and the brain and the body? And so I I found so much information on that that that became, I knew in my heart, this is what I want to do. I want to educate people on how mind and emotions can actually, not just have a detrimental effect in terms of stress, but how they could have a positive effect if we could harness different mental and emotional states. So I decided after four years that this is what, it was such a pull in me that this is what I believe I want to do, I want to to teach and I want to write and and so I just decided one day to leave the job and and and dive into what I do now.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I mean, that's incredible because you're giving up quite an incredible job at one of the world's biggest pharma companies where you're a prized asset and you're sort of, it's really entrepreneurial, because you're literally building your own path. I mean, where did you start on that new-found journey?
David Hamilton: By taking a big dive down the way. It was one of these instances that it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I had absolutely no idea how to do it. I remember I had to work because of the the level of my job, I had to work a three-month notice period as a kind of handover of projects and stuff. And I I was all pumped up initially. I remember about six weeks into it, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, what am I doing? What am I doing? I'm leaving a really well-paid job, fantastic career prospects, and I'm going to write, I failed my English at school. What am I doing? And I'm going to be a public speaker. Speaking in front of people frightens the life out of me. What am I doing? And what I really, what I found difficult, I was completely broke within a year, partly because I had no idea how to start this new career. I didn't know how. I'd gone from the safety of high school right into university. I literally finished my degree and was hired by one of the really well-known professors in the department to work the summer. and I literally finished with him on a Friday working a summer job at research job and then started my PhD on the Monday. I finished my PhD three years later on a Friday, started work with AstraZeneca the following Wednesday. I'd never been in the world. I didn't know what it was like to actually, if I worked at AstraZeneca, I need something done, I go to human resources and it's sorted for me. Now, how do you book a room to do a talk? How do you advertise it? So nobody came to my events. Because and plus, actually, I so lacked confidence. I I I always knew that I'd struggled with confidence, which is actually rooted in low self-esteem that I struggled with for for years. But I didn't realise how chronic it was until I actually had to go out in the world and do things for myself. And and so I struggled with advertising myself and putting myself out there which contributed to the fact to the reality of the fact that within a year I was absolutely broke, I mean, literally. And then I I moved sideways a friend, some friends and I set up an international relief charity called Spirit Aid Foundation. And I ran that as director for a couple of years. And I think that was my growing up period where I I had to, but now I had the support of a group of friends who were running this charity. And we had to really borrow and beg and all that to because we had no money initially to start. And so that period of growing up for me was was with the support rather than being on my own, I was with the support of friends making my way in the world all in a similar position. And and that is, I think I needed that kind of two-year period, really.
Dr Rupy Aujla: That's amazing. I mean, it must have been such a strong will and pull for you to leave that position and then grow up in the world. And there's so many parallels between what you've just talked about and medicine because when you start as a young, naive 18-year-old who just wants to save lives and save the world, you are, you enter into this sort of fraternity, if you like, where you are mollycoddled all the way up to junior doctor level and then you go up the ranks and it's very clear the path ahead of you. And to step outside of that, whether it be a different specialty, whether it be nutrition, whether it be leaving the specialty altogether or the industry altogether, it's very, very hard to do and you've actually got to have a lot of confidence and self-belief. It's quite interesting to note that you struggle with self-esteem because you don't appear to be someone who who lacks self-esteem. I wonder if we could double-click on that?
David Hamilton: Actually, that's often the case with a lot of people who struggle with self-esteem, you can't really tell. And I think, I wrote a book on this a few years ago because I knew I needed to work on it myself. It was beginning to have really, really harmful consequences in a number of areas of my life. And one of the things that I discovered early on in that is there's two types of self-esteem and we often get it back to front. There's external self-esteem, which is where you derive your sense of worthiness and value, if you will, from successes and achievements in life and maybe people having positive perceptions and opinions of you. And that can feel good. And as long as you're extracting that from the outside world all the time, then you can appear outwardly quite happy. But that's not really healthy. As they say in Scotland, your coat is on a shaky nail, meaning, all it takes is for a couple of things to go wrong, a couple of bad reviews, a change in perception, it's devastating. So what the other type of self-esteem which is more like what you might call self-love stroke self-compassion is an inner sense of your own worthiness and value. And that inner sense is not dependent upon successes and achievements and people liking you and having good opinions and perceptions and having nice reviews. It doesn't mean that you don't want those things. Of course, that's human nature. You naturally want to achieve and interact and have that, but it just means that your sense of worthiness deep in your heart and your soul if you will, is not rested upon those things. So if something on the external world changes, yes it can sting a little bit, but you've got this inner resilience, like a deep sense of worthiness and support that knows that no matter what, I'm still here. I've got this. It's like an inner resource that almost can of buffers some of the winds and the storms from the outside world if they emerge in your life. And I swiftly realised that I had a fair bit of the former, the external self-esteem that made me seem to people outwardly happy. But on the inside, I struggled a lot of the time because I had almost zero of the inner and stuff. And so often times in my quiet moments, I would be really struggling. And then I was a yo-yo kind of thing, sometimes I'd be really happy to be in certain places, but other times I was trying to avoid places and people because I, you know, I got this weird resurgence of the lack of inner sense of worthiness and value and I found myself pulling away from situations and people. And so I would have this kind of little wave motion where sometimes I was there and sometimes I was not. But nobody notices when you're not kind of thing. But it was really interfering a lot in my sense of happiness and life itself and almost every area of my life and so I had to deal with it, really.
Dr Rupy Aujla: This is quite interesting because it's almost like a parallel with celebrities or those in the public eye because they constantly have to be on, they constantly have to demonstrate whatever that persona is, whether it's them being loud or funny, comedians are perhaps some of the worst of it. But it's almost that we all need to build up this inner sense of worthiness because in a sense, social media has made us all celebrities. Every single one of us. We all have photos of us on digital media. We are all validated or criticised via comments and likes and engagements and building up that self-confidence has never been so important. And I wonder if there are some ways in which you can share that perhaps listeners could utilise to build up that because I mean, I I'm certainly lacking in those myself. Not to turn this into a psychotherapy session, but I think having that rock solid inner foundation is really important for everyone and particularly right now.
David Hamilton: It is and actually, I I found that most people I know do struggle with that inner side of themselves. And I think because maybe we don't realise the importance of the inner sense of worthiness and value because I think the way life and achievements and social media and stuff is presented to us, we somehow assume that it's the external stuff that matters the most. And so it's a big shift. But you know, one of the simplest and most powerful tools I ever learned was the, the, the bidirectional relation was based on this bidirectional relationship between your, how you feel and how that feeling is expressed on your physical body. In other words, how you hold and move your body. And when I say bidirectional, what I mean is that it goes both ways. In other words, if you feel happy, you naturally smile. Now you don't smile because you're because you say, I feel really happy. What is it I do with my face again? Oh yeah, I better pull my my my zygomaticus major muscle into a smile. You don't remember to, it's a reflex reaction because the positive emotional centres of the brain are connected in some ways to the smile muscles, this one here and the one at the side of the eyes, the orbicularis oculi. I just like saying the name. It sounds really cool. Not because anyone needs to know it. I just I'm indulging the fact I love the sound orbicularis oculi. Sounds like a character in a in a novel. Yeah, a spaceman, a new Disney movie or something. So, so but similarly, if you feel stressed, again, you don't remember to to tense your face and this corrugator supercilii muscle. You don't remember to do that and you don't remember to tighten your jaw and remember to hunch your shoulders. Again, these things are reflex reactions because the outward expression on your muscles is connected to the circuitry of the brain that's processing these negative emotional states. You could think of it a good analogy might be like a puppet on a string. So when you feel a certain way, it's like a puppet master pulls the appropriate muscles in that way. But this is where bidirectional comes in. Because if you recognise that that happens, then you can adjust your posture, your muscles, your facial expressions, your breathing even, your spine, how you hold and move your body and that turns the puppet master around. And now it's your body that's controlling how you feel. And it's an exceptionally powerful tool. I first got switched on to it when a friend sent me when I was writing the book on it, on on self-love, a friend sent me research on what is now called the Harvard power pose. And it was a professor called Amy Cuddy who had done this little experiment where she got people to stand like Wonder Woman or or Superman for just two minutes while having levels of hormones associated with stress or hormones associated with self-confidence and self-belief sampled. And amazingly, within just two minutes of standing like Wonder Woman, Superman, levels of stress hormone dropped substantially and levels of hormones associated with confidence and self-belief actually rose substantially in and the opposite happened for people. She asked people as a comparison to stand in a way that made that they would do if they felt lacking in confidence or self-belief. So like that or fearful, you know, bite your nails or move your eyes, anything that that you would normally do if you feel nervous or afraid or fearful. And stress hormone levels in two minutes spiked and all the hormones associated with confidence and self-esteem dropped. So she, so she, she wrote in her research that you can actually use your body to create how you want to feel. And I, when I read that, I thought, wow. So I really went to town. I did that every single day. That became my morning spiritual practice where I would stand like Wonder Woman, you know, sometimes I'd just get, no one's in the room, I'd stand like Superman, you know, and for two minutes, time myself. And then I'd walk around the room trying to find a way of moving and and almost trying to program, this is how I will walk from now on in my quiet moments. I'll drop my shoulders a bit, I'll stretch my spine, I'll be conscious of my breathing because that helps my posture as well and it slows my mind down. And I literally relentlessly over the next couple of months, I adjusted and corrected my posture relentlessly throughout the day, whether I was standing in the queue at a coffee shop or sitting in a seat or just walking to town or carrying shopping, it didn't matter, relentlessly about 10 times a day, maybe more, I would remember to adjust my posture and try to tell my brain this is how I want to feel. Now a remarkable thing happens there because the brain, if you adjust any muscles consistently, the brain undergoes neuroplasticity in regions associated with those muscles. I mean, Harvard, great experiment Harvard got volunteers to play five notes in a piano repetitively for five days and it literally grew the region of the brain connected to the finger muscles like a muscle. And so I figured that will happen to these muscles I'm exercising. And at the same time, the muscles associated with fear and anxiety and stress and worry or low self-esteem, I'm not using those muscles as much. So therefore the, the neural centres of those will begin to degrade. And what I will get is a tipping point. That was my theory, my hypothesis if you will, that I would start to build the regions of the brain where the of the muscles associated with feeling good in the inside and reduce the muscles in, you know, the neuro the centres of the brain in the regions associated with low self-esteem. And if that was the case, then that would automatically have an impact on how I felt. And it literally, it was life-changing. Within two month, I'd say within two months, it was unbelievably life-changing. I've never gone back because I've never gone back to the old posture because the gains and how I felt in the inside, it was phenomenal. And I became so passionate talking about that because it was, I didn't have to meet my inner child and I didn't have to do any extensive psychotherapy work. And I'm not, please don't assume I'm knocking those, these are so valuable at particular times in your life. But for where I was at that time, the immediate thing I needed was something powerful and fast that didn't take a lot of mental effort because I didn't have the mental effort to put into it. I didn't have the head space. I needed something relatively simple. And how much simpler than adjusting your posture providing you do it often enough. You can't change brain circuits unless you keep doing something repetitively. So I knew I had to do this repetitively all throughout the day for a number of weeks to get it to stick. But a little, it was the most powerful technique that I've ever ever practised in my life for anything.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I I absolutely love the simplicity of that and I think it's an important point you bring up there about psychotherapy. Yes, it's an incredible tool and I I I would urge, I think a lot of people should engage in it if they can, but it can feel like a massive step. I mean, just even having the confidence to admit to yourself and other people, I might need help here, there might be something in my past or my present that I need to work on. But the simple act of changing body posture and having those almost immediate effects over a few months and the analogy of a muscle getting stronger, hypertrophying, becoming more resilient, I I I really, really enjoy that. And and that's something that, because I've watched a couple of lectures of yours, and that's something that you can actually see demonstrated on functional MRIs, with not only the the physical change, but the mental sort of visualisation of it as well. Even if you you you can't get up or you don't have the opportunity to to stand in front of your mirror for two minutes. Just the thought of it alone can be as impactful.
David Hamilton: In fact, one of the, I've spoken a lot even in sports coaching, you know, by by suggesting, because there's a lot of research on if you repetitively visualise a movement, for example, a sports person who's struggled with a particular type of, say it's a tennis shot for example, if you relentlessly visualise that shot where you find your weakness, then your muscles not only get stronger and more adapted, but the neural centres of the brain undergo the same kind of change, even if you just imagine it kind of thing. And lots of research has been done on patients who've had a stroke that's speeded up rehabilitation if they visualise again for at least half an hour a day, four or five times a week doing movements that they're familiar with. So, so one of the things I remember running a wee course on public speaking. And and all I was teaching people was a wee bit about how to tap into your own self, but the main exercise was visualising themselves on the actual stage. But not what most people do is you visualise the end result with people clapping and I said, no, visualise from the moment your name is called and you're moving off the chair and visualise your body language, feel your shoulders dropping with relaxation because normally if your name's been called, you start feeling anxious. So your body goes into anxiety mode and your muscles will then make you feel even more anxious. So imagine dropping your shoulders, lengthening your spine, reducing your rate of walking to the stage, imagine your breathing comfortably. Now what you're doing is you're creating the emotional state associated with what you want to be. And then imagine delivering the first minute or two of your talk. Not just what you're saying, but imagine how you say those things. Imagine the way in which you say, the rate of speech, imagine slowing down your speech and and emphasizing particular points. And do that repetitively and when you come to that situation, your brain will default into that and you'll that will come quite naturally. And the reason it works is because if you visualise something, in many ways, particularly if it's a muscle movement, the brain doesn't make much of a distinction between whether you're actually doing it or whether you're imagining doing it. There was, I mentioned briefly a few moments ago about Harvard research led by a professor called Alvaro Pascual-Leone. He got volunteers to play notes in the piano for two hours a day for five days and they had brain regions, the brain scanned in the region associated connected with finger muscles and there was massive change. But another group of people, he asked to imagine playing the notes for the same two hours and five consecutive days. It's called kinaesthetic imagery. And what you're doing is you're imagining how it would feel if you were playing the notes. So imagine, you can look at, imagine looking at your fingers, that works as well. But in particular, imagine as if you really were, imagine as if you really were playing the notes with your fingers for that two hours. And he scanned their brain as well and amazingly, if you held the brain scans side by side of those who played the notes after five days, those who imagined is exactly the same, about a 97% pixel overlap if you you count the the area. But 97% overlap. In other words, in that exercise, the brain made no distinction at all between who played the notes with their fingers and who played the notes with their mind. So visualising stuff in the brain, you're to your brain can be as if you really are doing the stuff or as if the stuff is really, really happening. So that, I I use that as well for developing my self-esteem, particularly in reach in situations I knew that I would tend to be feeling a bit anxious about or nervous about or feeling a bit shy about. And so I'd visualise myself for a week leading up to it, like five times a day, you know, it doesn't take five, it doesn't take a couple of minutes, but just rehearse, mentally rehearse the thing. But not just rehearse the interaction, but rehearse how my, how I will be holding and moving my body in the lead up to and going through that situation. And that's what you rehearse, not just the final outcome, yes, final outcome, but paying more attention to how you develop, how you create that final outcome through how you're holding and moving your body. And that was so incredibly useful, particularly for those moments that I knew that I tended to be weaker on in sense in terms of how I felt about myself in the inside.
Dr Rupy Aujla: It has huge implications, because if you dig into how the placebo effect actually works, then you see something similar impacting the entire body, the entire body. because ultimately, coming back to that example of pain, for example, when a person gets a placebo for pain, the pain goes away a lot of the time, not just because they're imagining it's going away or because they think it's going away, it's because the brain has actually produced its own natural version of morphine. So what happens is the brain has produced what it needs to produce to deliver what the person believes is supposed to happen. In other words, belief, and and this is a much broader concept, not just belief, but even visualisation and other things, causes the brain to produce what it needs to produce to deliver what you are focused on, whether you believe something, expect something or even imagining it. And and broadly speaking, that's kind of how the mind-body connection works. Like different emotional, even visualisation, like visualising the immune system for example, like little piranha fish destroying pathogens and stuff has actually been shown to activate and enhance immune function. So what's happening there, it's similar to the placebo effect. In other words, you're the, your, mobilizing the body's natural resources to deliver what you're focused on, whether the focus is a belief, an expectation, a feeling or an imagination. And even in some ways, it's very related to stress. When you feel stressed, you produce stress hormones, not necessarily because you're in a stressful situation, but because of how you feel, because two people can be in the exact same situation. One feels stressed and one doesn't. So the one who's feeling stressed will have far more adrenaline and cortisol than the other one. So it's not really the situation. I mean, out with really serious events where the nervous system kicks in, of course, but for most of the stressful situations in our lives, it's our perception of a situation more than the situation itself. But turn that around and what about its opposite? Physiologically, the opposite of stress is kindness. It's how kindness feels. Some psychologists refer to it as elevation. You know, kindness feels like an elevated state. You help someone, it feels satisfying and it feels nice. If you observe an act of kindness, sometimes you feel moved or inspired. But globally, those are referred to similarly as elevation. Now, elevation, that feeling associated with kindness, rather than producing stress hormones because you feel stressed, they produce, I call them kindness hormones. Really just to to show that they're produced by the same overall mechanism. It's how you feel that generates it. Now the main kindness hormone actually is oxytocin, the reproductive hormone. But that's not just a reproductive hormone. It has multiple roles in the body. It's actually a cardio, what few people know, very few people know, it's a cardio protective hormone. And that means that it delivers some degree of cardio protection. One of the principal ways it does it is by reducing blood pressure. To be more technical, it stimulates the production of nitric oxide and atrial natriuretic peptide. And so they do the business. As I just call it ANP. Yeah, yeah. Cuz I can't pronounce it properly. I can't either, obviously, neither can I. So it produces nitric oxide and ANP, which does the business of reducing blood pressure. But oxytocin produces those things. So any state that produces oxytocin therefore will, I mean, the research on this began by noticing that women breastfeeding had lower blood pressure. And this was more than 20 years ago when the research was first done. And they realised that what was causing it was the production of oxytocin and therefore the, the nitric oxide and the ANP production coming out of that. All the research since. So, in other words, being kind because of how it makes you feel is cardio protective because it delivers, because of how you feel delivers that all that ultimate, switches on that that mechanism, just like feeling stressed increases blood pressure, feelings associated with kindness can have the opposite effect. This is why I call it an opposite, kindness is the opposite of stress. But ultimately, what it really is a demonstration of is the mind-body connection. It's, here is a feeling and the feeling is causing a beneficial physiological state. And we've known about this for a hundred years. You feel stressed, it produces these effects. It's only nowadays we're turning it around and saying, wait a minute, it's not feeling, stress isn't the only feeling a person can have. And and this is a, this is part of a large body of research, like the placebo effect, that shows that a psychological state of expectation or belief produces a neurological and also a physiological effect. Visualisation, for example, produces effects, neurological, physiological and affects at the cellular level in terms of how muscle activity works and even visualising the immune system impacts immune function. So, feelings associated with stress, feelings associated with kindness have equal and opposite effects. So what we're seeing is a large body of research now showing that how you think, feel and believe does have effects. So the challenge in life then is, can I therefore, instead, make sure that my mind and emotions are dominated with healthy, in in healthy with dominant states rather than reactive, stressfully things. It's not easy to do, but if we know that would be healthy, then it's I guess one of the steps forward is, let's figure out how to change your mindset so that the mind becomes more naturally able to, as you, you know, as you look through the landscape of your life on an average day, that your mind naturally settles more in the light than the dark, if you will.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I I I love all this research looking at specific parameters as well, particularly immune function. You know, it's quite simple to to measure in serum, you know, the response to an endotoxin. And all the things that we're talking about with the mind-body connection would have been dismissed 20 years ago. And you know, you're truly one of the pioneers of this because you probably had undergone a lot of criticism throughout your career up until this point. It's only until now that you know, you have all these publications from distinguished institutions that validate a lot of what we've been thinking for many years. And it stems a lot from ancient medicines, whether it be Chinese or Ayurveda as well. And I think, you know, this is really a suite of different medical interventions that we have. I like to talk about nutritional medicine and diet, but I think the the aspects of mind-body medicine, exercise, sleep, hygiene, all these things can have a measurable impact on things like the immune system. And we need to be a lot more um receptive to all these different ways. And I love the fact that you mentioned expressive writing because I was having a conversation with a couple of specialists in migraine. And they're medical doctors. And they use expressive writing with their patients who are suffering from migraine. And it's and it's one of the most uh uh positive tools that they've had with their patients and it and it leads to anecdotal but demonstrable impacts on the frequency of migraines, which is fascinating.
David Hamilton: It's so so important to not wash over, I'm so glad you asked that that question because it is easy to become obsessed with, I've got to be positive, I've got to be positive, I've got to be positive. And it's not so much like that. It's more about you're training yourself so that that becomes more natural, not forced. But in the process of it becoming more natural, you have to deal with the stuff that comes out and not push it, not push it inside, if you will. And and there's a lot of research on how emotions can be lodged in the body. In the sense that I mean, if you understand that there is a mind-body connection, then if there's an emotional state that you haven't dealt with, it would make sense that in some way, whether it's just through the stress effects and certain ways that that could well have a counterpart in the body in some way that the body is functioning. There was some really cracking research on expressive writing. So this is about getting out what is inside. And basically what happened is they found this technique, it was four consecutive days writing for 15 minutes a day. So that was all, 15 minutes a day on four consecutive days. And it was a guy, a professor called James Pennebaker. And he's written, I think the book's called 'Expressive Writing' actually, he's a professor, psychology professor. And he pioneered this technique, simple technique. And what he did, he got a group of people who would write for 15 minutes just about life. And they were compared with people writing about 15 minutes a day, four consecutive days, about stuff that they felt had traumatized them in some way. So whether it was a massive, you know, life-changing trauma, or whether it was just something milder, like just situations that been, feeling hurt or dejected because someone's broken up with you or something else and there's an or any traumas and and emotional challenges and issues that anyone has. There a whole spectrum. 15 minutes a day, writing just what happened, how you felt about it then, how you feel about it now, how it's affected your life. That was just the guidelines really, just to help you to dive into it and get out of it. Four days later, they in a number of experiments, one of the experiments they did, they they tracked medical visits to the medical centre. This was done initially with students, a couple of hundred students, they tracked over the previous six months and the next six months numbers of visits to the health centre. And there was a massive drop in health centre visits for those who'd literally spent 15 minutes a day expressive writing. And other research, they tried to track why that was. And there was a number of, less stress, better positive emotions. But one of the things they tracked was a massive increase in immune function. what one of the things they did, they they gave people an endotoxin, exposed people to an endotoxin, you know, the harmless part of a toxin. And and they found that the immune response to the endotoxin in those who were who'd done the expressive writing was, I think it was like an order of magnitude or whatever the measure, it was significantly higher than for those who hadn't done the expressive writing but who had for the same duration of time had written 15 minutes a day but just about ordinary life events. So there was, so here was an immunological effect of having just got out of the system 15 minutes a day. So it's so, so important. So I love what you said about toxic positivity because we end up thinking I have to be positive all the time. But it's not really about that. It's, it's like training a muscle. You're training yourself so that that becomes natural, not forced. And if it, in the process of it becoming natural, stuff will come up and it's best to deal with it and not push it deep inside.
Dr Rupy Aujla: It's an anecdote and it's not something that I I recommend that everyone just do without the blessing of the cardiologist, which is what I had. Um but it it certainly put me on my path towards this. And I think in very much the same way as yourself, although I feel like I'm further back on my own journey, it's just pushing yourself forward and always trying to grow and expand and enjoy the ride and practise kindness and compassion as much as possible along the way.
David Hamilton: I I I I'm working on, I I'm, I've got an online community that I'm, I work a lot on and developing that. I do live talks every month, personal development, it's called Personal Development Club. And I invest a lot of time in in creating video content and audio content for that, which is based on the needs of members, basically. And I'm also working on a book at the moment that's that's finding scientific evidence for stuff that people tend to be skeptical about if I think the skepticism is knee-jerk or unfounded. So even some, some aspects of alternative health and lifestyle that people would tend to be skeptical about. And I'm building a scientific framework around because a lot of skepticism on things, even like the mind-body connection, is completely unfounded. I call it knee-jerk skepticism. It's it doesn't sound plausible. But when you say something doesn't sound plausible, it's mostly because you have no expertise in that field. And so what I'm doing is I'm gathering a large number of subjects that that people think of in those kind of ways and I've found some amazing, fascinating information really. And it's what's worked really well with the fact that I'm halfway through a degree part-time degree in mathematics and physics. I was going to ask, is is that why you decided to do your degree in mathematics and physics to to sort of shape that framework? Partly related because I was starting to write a little bit when I was touching on things like quantum entanglement and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, I take my role as a writer and an educator very seriously. And when you have PhD after your name and you say something that's scientific, people consider you as an expert. And I I I worried that I might be misrepresenting that subject that I don't really know intuitively that well. It's just from what you read here and there. And and stuff. And I thought that doesn't feel for me that I'm taking my role seriously. So I decided to do a degree in it. I've been reading through a university text anyway on relativity because I was exploring the parallels between Einstein's relativity theory and Tibetan Buddhism because Tibetan Buddhism have a theory of relativity. It's called dependent origination. But it's in spiritual language, the equivalent of Einstein's mathematical relativity theory. And I was writing about that parallel. I just again, I just didn't feel I knew the science well enough. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to do a formal honours degree and study it. It's very, very dense mathematics. I've just done an exam with covering quantum mechanics, relativity, Pauli exclusion principle, gravitational fields, electromagnetism. It was heavy going in the maths, but I love it because it's given me a depth of understanding of principles that I'd only just talked about because I'd read it somewhere in a popular science thing. But now my understanding of it is far deeper and far more intuitive and there's less risk of misrepresenting the science. And that's really why I I'm studying formally so that I so that when I say something, it's factually correct. And it's not something that I've made an error with.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I feel a wee bit nervous about writing this book because I've built up a lot of credibility over the years because I'm writing about important things and I back up everything with science. But I'm now venturing into some subjects that are met with more skepticism, maybe where I was 20 years ago when I first started to write on the mind-body connection, it was people were very skeptical and I did get a bit of criticism from former colleagues back at that time. You know, I remember being, being forwarded an email by a friend that was circulating amongst people I knew who were laughing at me for having left AstraZeneca and be into this thing writing about try to write about the mind-body connection and thought this was hilarious. Poor guy, you know, what a downfall for what was originally such a talented scientist, what a great downfall to be into this woo-woo stuff of the mind and all that. And so I feel like I'm going back to a place that I was in that I found very uncomfortable and it was scary because I was struggling with my self-esteem and it was scary the insults that you got back then and and the attacks sometimes from aggressive, people who are aggressively skeptical, even when the skepticism again is is unfounded. But I feel like I'm venturing into the same territory again. I have to say I feel scared a wee bit. And again it's it's, maybe it's another layer of self-esteem I have to work on because I have been, you know, people do take what I say seriously and I have built up a good reputation in the mainstream. And here I'm broaching subjects that more people are skeptical about. And I feel a wee bit worried that I'll lose some of my credibility, even though I've been very scientific in the book. But but also that it'll be attacked by people who won't even read the book, who will just take the subtitle or a bit of text in the back which often happens. And I don't know, I, some parts of me are not quite healed yet and still feel fragile a lot of the time. People just don't see that side. But a lot of parts of me do feel fragile sometimes and I feel a wee bit honestly nervous about the book. And I've never been nervous about a book for more than a decade because I've always been in subjects that are more mainstream, like kindness and self-esteem, mind-body connection. Even my book 'How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body' is very, very mainstream. Everything's backed up with science. Even though this book is too, I'm broaching into subjects that people are naturally more skeptical about. So being honest, I'm excited sometimes and fragile at other times about it. And I don't know how I'm going to, how I'm going to be when the book comes out next year.
David Hamilton: I I I feel like it's important to be authentic and for me, my natural growth takes me into the spiritual, what we normally think of as the spiritual aspects of life. And that's who I am. It's who I've always been. I've just not given as much attention to that side of me in writing and speaking for the last few years. And I can't help it anymore. I can't suppress it. It's just who I am and it's it's coming out of me and it's it's an area I have to move into more for me. And I always feel balanced. You see, I always need to find this balance. As that side of me is growing, I'm also pushing out into the heavy duty mathematics and physics. It's almost as one side expands, another side expands so that I always find myself balanced, if that makes sense. I'm never too much spiritual or too much science. I always find a balance somewhere. And so whenever one side expands, the other side goes with it. If that makes, that's why I think, if you think of it that analogy, the the mathematics and physics I'm going into is is finding its balance with the expansion in the spiritual aspects of myself. So I feel like in in honoring my growth, it's way, this book is way out of my comfort zone. And but I have to do it because sometimes the greatest gains in self-esteem lie just at the edge of your comfort zone. And I'm a work in progress. Like I think everyone is. I I, you know, self-esteem, you get to a point but there's never an endpoint. It's like you said earlier about learning and you're never an expert, you're always something new. So there's always new growth and I feel now I'm at a point where the next level of growth is just outside my comfort zone. And so I have to do this for me. And even if it is met with skepticism and attack, if that does happen, I have to learn to to stand up for myself and I have to learn to deal with that better than maybe I have in in the past. So, so on an underlying level, that's why I have to, I have to do this book for me.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I mean that it's I'm so glad you talked about this because I don't think people in the science world like such as ourselves talk about this enough. And I was met with a ton of skepticism last year when my my last book, 'Eat to Beat Illness' came out and I was attacked by former colleagues as well. And they hadn't even read the book. It was just, just the title, just the subtext or whatever, just or just how it's represented in the media or whatever. Um and I think I mean it's really authentic that you're even admitting to yourself let alone on the pod and everyone listening that it's nerve-wracking but I think that's almost like that negative energy that's going to be converted into something positive as well. Um but it it's almost like a really exciting time for you, just to flip it on its head because you are almost like pushing your own boundaries and you're forcing yourself to be as authentic as possible because ultimately this is what you believe in and this is what I believe in as well. And almost, we almost need people like you to put the homework in, to to study it to within an inch of its life and and to present it in a format that everyone can actually understand and it will help people as well.
David Hamilton: one of the tools that I learned about building self-esteem is allowing yourself to feel vulnerable, but deciding that people's perception of you, might even sound that you're weak or you don't know what you're talking about, that that doesn't matter so much as how you feel about yourself and it doesn't matter so much as the fact that you had the courage to say it anyway. And so part of me being honest now is being embracing your own vulnerability and not being afraid to do it is a massive declaration of self-esteem to yourself that even though people might be judgmental, I'm going to do it anyway because this is who I am. And so I am practising self-esteem right now in in part of this conversation.
Dr Rupy Aujla: I feel like I'm in a big hug right now.
David Hamilton: Yeah, me too. I'm hugging you back, virtually hugging you back right now.
Dr Rupy Aujla: We can sense it. And it's it's weird because there's so many parallels to our story because so my mum was ill when I was younger, um and she went on her own sort of lifestyle medicine journey. Um she, she was very analytical about everything that she did. She improved her lifestyle and her diet and everything. But she also would have affirmations. She really honed her her mind and her mental energy to to focus on overcoming her condition, which is idiopathic anaphylaxis, serious, serious condition. Um and that kind of inspired me to go into medicine and then during medicine, completely forgot why I was in the first place, was very, very skeptical. And then I had my own health issues when I came out and I was a junior doctor, um and I was, I had atrial fibrillation, cardio, cardiac issue, where my heart would beat, you know, 200 beats plus per minute irregularly two to three times a week. And I was going to have the ablation, which is the conventional route. And my mum was the one that was like, no, you need to focus on lifestyle and diet. And I was like, you don't know what you're talking about. This is woo-woo stuff. You can't mental health, your way out of this stuff, mindset your way out of this stuff. Um but I appeased her and that's when I became, you know, a convert because I overcame my own condition, an anecdote and it's not something that I I recommend that everyone just do without the blessing of the cardiologist, which is what I had. Um but it it certainly put me on my path towards this. And I think in very much the same way as yourself, although I feel like I'm further back on my own journey, it's just pushing yourself forward and always trying to grow and expand and enjoy the ride and practise kindness and compassion as much as possible along the way.
David Hamilton: one of the things I find fascinating about kindness is it's highly contagious. In fact, it is the most contagious thing. Researchers at Harvard and Yale, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler did some research where they found that kindness ripples outwards like a pebble dropped in a pond. You know, if you drop a pebble in a pond and it goes out and in different and you see the waves rising and falling and moving out. At the other end of the pond, a wee lily pad does that and it's waving up and down and you you think, why is the lily pad waving up and down? It's because of the pebble. But the pebble is, the lily pad's going up and down because of the wave. But what created the wave was the pebble dropped in the pond. Now that's a really good metaphor. It's why, maybe that's why they call it the ripple effect. It's a very good metaphor for kindness because kindness is the pebble dropped in a pond. And what Fowler and Christakis did is they tracked the waves. And what they found is if you be kind to someone, that because of how you make that person feel, that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how you made them feel. Now that someone else is called one degree of separation from you, one social step away. But that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how they they're made to feel. And that's two degrees of separation. But that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how they feel. And that's three degrees of separation. That's the lily pad now at the far end of the pond. But it's not just one lily pad. It's many, many lily pads because this is where the R number comes in. Because one of the things Christakis and Fowler did in that paper and if you look at some other research, you can see that the R number for kindness is somewhere between four and five and actually nearer to five. In Christakis and Fowler's it was four given the constraints of that piece of that research. But in actual fact, if you look at other stuff, it's probably closer to five. And what that means is when you're kind to someone, because of how you make that person feel, and I'm talking to any listener today, if you do something kind for someone, if you were to follow them around for the rest of the day, which I hope you don't, but if you had to, what you would notice is because of how you made that person feel, whether grateful, relaxed, relieved, satisfied, inspired, moved, whatever, that person will likely be kind or kinder to five people over the course of the rest of the day, over the course of the next 24 hours because of how you made them feel. Now that's the R number, five. Now each of those five will be kind or kinder to five further people. So that's the second wave going out towards the lily pad. Now that's 25 at two degrees of separation, but each of those 25 will be kind or kinder to five. And now that's 125 lily pads from a single pebble. So it's 125 people from a single act of kindness. And obviously that number it will vary, it'll be higher for some people, lower for other people, lots of factors. But on average, about 125 people. So the listeners today, if you do something kind for someone, it does not stop with that person. That person will absolutely be kind or kinder to more people as the day goes on and each of those will be more and you'll literally, you're setting in motion all these ripples. Now, this is the reason I say it's more contagious is even at its peak, the R number for coronavirus was about 2.5, even at its peak. Now at three degrees of separation, that's 2.5, one person infects 2.5 who infects 2.5 who infects 2.5. So that's 16, 15.625, about 16 people at three, 16 people at three degrees of separation. But but kindness is 125. So the R number tells you how exponential it is. So kindness is far, far more exponential than than the coronavirus. And it's a nice way to think about it because coronavirus hasn't reached every household but kindness has. And that's just a, that just shows us if you think about it. Think about it. Kindness is everywhere. More, far more places than the virus ever got to because it's so highly contagious. And it taps into our nature, our deepest, the the gene for the kindness hormone is one of the oldest in the human genome. It's 500 million years old and four days. No, not four days. I'm just joking. It's 500 million years old. It's had 500 million all all warm-blooded species have a version of it. And it's one of the things that keeps animals together. It animals come together and they socialise, they play and it's related to that because the gene is so old, so ancient, it plays such a vital health role and a role in social behaviour that's ensured the survival of all species to to this point. And so in 500 million years, that's why it's involved in so many different parts of the body. It's involved in the cardiovascular system, the immune system, even involved in the the creation of neurons, like neurogenesis, it's involved in cardiomyogenesis, the building of of heart muscle cells. It's involved in building our bones and our skin, it's involved in digestion, gastric motility, it plays many, many important roles, even rebuilding blood vessels, angiogenesis. It plays huge numbers of roles in the body, the kindness hormone which suggests that all of these functions in the body respond to being kind. So, so not only is it contagious out in the world, it's contagious inside your own world, inside your own body. It has multiple effects. Being kind has multiple health-giving effects in yourself.
