You're all alone in the middle of nowhere.
Who are you going to call?
Uh, my mum?
No, Mark Matheson.
I think the one thing I've learnt about humans is that we are immensely capable of change.
Gina Chick's psychologist while on alone...
I definitely underestimated the impact loneliness would have on me.
Mark was there for Gina and now he's there for us.
If, hypothetically, you could go back in time and you could change one mistake in your eyes that humans made, is there one thing that you would go back and change...
Definitely up there with the top things for my own mental health and when I've been struggling has been gardening.
Why does that feel so good?
You've been thinking about this question for decades.
Where do you think we have gone wrong?
Hmm.
What?
A cliffhanger in a trailer?
Come on.
I would like to jump straight into it today with a really big question for you.
So according to the World Health Organization- Who?
Yes, the peak medical body in the world.
Yep, yep.
Who?
So currently, globally, there are one billion people with-
Some for mental disorder, so one in seven people globally.
They believe there are approximately 720,000 suicides a year globally.
You've been thinking about this question for decades.
Where do you think we have gone wrong?
Nothing like a tough question to kick things off.
No pressure.
A little icebreaker.
So this podcast is going to go for hell.
Mark, have fun with it, you know.
Look, great question.
And I think, yeah, you're right.
I think I don't know if I have the exact answer.
You know, like many people, I think I'm grappling with it myself in my own life as well as, you know, trying to grapple with it professionally.
But
For me, I think the journey that I've been on, it's led me to a couple of sort of fundamental truths.
One is that we've kind of disconnected psychologically, socially, culturally.
From, you know, the biosphere, if you want to call it that, the ecological support system of the planet, which has kept humans alive for nearly two million years.
So headed off on a trajectory which I think for all intents and purposes is meant to be good for us and comfortable and safe, and it no doubt is in many ways.
But we've kind of missed something in doing that.
You know, we've headed off on that trajectory kind of almost despite where the rest of the planet in the ecosystem is going.
And I think it's that disconnection, which for me is part of the foundational kind of rationale for why I think we're now seeing higher levels of pathology and rates of suicide and other things.
I think what perhaps modern science has got wrong, if I was to be critical of anything, is to say that, well, the problem resides entirely within us.
And there's certainly truth in that, of course.
Many of the modern treatments are great at dealing with some of those intrapersonal issues.
But, you know, we haven't really broadened the lens to say, well, what else is going on?
Why are we in this position?
So a disconnection from nature is sort of what you're saying?
Well, from the patterns and cycles in nature which have sustained us for, you know, certainly in our current form for 170,000 years.
Yeah.
You know, so we're living more time indoors.
We're, you know, running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill, taking more and more, you know, supplements and…
Interventions that are meant to try and put Band-Aids on things and more approaches to therapy, more psychologists than ever before, more psychiatrists than ever before.
When you say, and I think I know what the hedonic treadmill is and I always sort of know and I always kind of forget.
Can you just give a quick explanation of what that is?
Yeah, sure.
So that treadmill is that process of just...
You know, ticking all the boxes that we have to do on a daily checklist, check our phones, check our emails, get a cab to work, you know, turn the air conditioner on.
And, you know, to some degree, keeping up with the Joneses, you know, pay a mortgage, buying the right car, wearing the right clothes.
Nothing wrong with any of those things, but they've become so overwhelming, I think, that for many of us now, we've kind of probably gone even past capacity, you know, from a purely biological perspective.
We're just kind of asking ourselves to do ways too much.
And we talk about burnout and mental health as symptoms of that, really.
I thought the hedonic...
When you said it, I thought it was that treadmill that's curved that's not powered.
Parabolic.
Yeah, parabolic.
I'm glad we clarified, John.
What you're saying there reminds me of a friend of mine, a really good friend who lives in London and has been...
I would say thriving for most of his life.
And recently I learned that he's not doing too well.
And we were talking on the phone and he was describing a few things.
And he went and saw a doctor and was medicated a lot quicker than I would have.
I was so shocked at how quickly they said, here's some meds to get rid of that.
But when he was telling me everything that was going on,
It felt from an outsider looking in, it's like you've lived in a hectic city for 10 years and you don't really like your job.
It feels pretty obvious what's going on here.
But hearing all the things he was doing, he's like, I'm doing cold plunging.
I'm meditating.
I'm keeping fit.
I'm watching what I eat.
I'm now on these meds, but nothing seems to be working.
And it kind of felt like, isn't this obvious?
Yeah.
And it is obvious when you have that sort of overarching ability to step back and see what's going on, which I think I've been really fortunate to do in my career working with
A whole bunch of really unique and special people in quotation marks.
You know, the job of a psychologist is to kind of be that arbitrator of what's normal.
And so there are many contexts where we sort of accelerate or support a way of being in the world, living in a big city, which are promulgated and suggested as a good way to live.
They're a comfortable life.
You've got all the basic needs that you supposedly require.
Apart from, you know, sanity and time to kind of breathe and be a normal human being.
So I think I actually, you know, personally, maybe not so much professionally have evidence for, but personally I think we've kind of over-evolved, you know, through modern life.
Yeah.
We're now doing things that biologically, psychologically, socially, we were never designed, if you want to talk about humans as being ecologically designed, to do.
So a lot of what you've started to talk about, and I think we're going to go into today, I think you define as human systems ecology.
Maybe it would be good for us to get a bit of a sort of
Definition of that and how it kind of differs to a lot of sort of traditional Western psychology.
Yeah, sure.
So I think- Or compliments, perhaps.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
Probably just broadens, I think, is what I would use.
So, I mean, traditional psychology obviously studies, you know, what's going on in terms of, you know, people's behavior and thoughts.
So it's sort of interpersonal, intrapersonal.
Whereas what I think I've sort of been really fortunate to do over the last sort of 20 years is see people in all sorts of extremes and from that be able to see some bigger systems, ways that it's not just the individual, but it's their social setting, their cultural setting, also their biology in terms of where they are.
Geographically in sunlight and all those sorts of triggers that are specific to where you are on the planet.
So human systems ecology really just views humans as part of a broader living system.
So you can't really use that reductionist Western science of just trying to
Pull apart thoughts or pull apart behaviours inside the individual.
It's saying, well, what environmental variables are also playing a part in that broader view of what's going on for that person?
So is that a cultural issue?
Is it a geographic issue in terms of sunlight or nutrition or...
Temperature in as much as it's just what's going on inside their head.
Yeah.
So it's always trying to look at that broad lens and then understand that unique individual's behaviour within the much broader lens of the systems they live in.
Is there a kind of a weird, like...
Comfort, even though, because I feel like I know so well that this morning is a really good example.
So this morning, like my morning routine is like I'll get up and I'll go into like the spare room where there's a...
Peloton bike exercise bike and i do stretches and i
It's in like a little room though yep
But my partner jam she's
She hates the gym she loves going out loves being outside and is always saying to me can't we just go for a walk outside in the morning instead of my instead of just being in the gym which i'm trying to kind of convince her to do but she just hates doing it yep
And even though I know that a walk outside would be a really nice change-up, there's a weird comfort that there is in the routine...
So is there a sort of psychological thing going on with us that even though we know these regular things that we're doing indoors that aren't necessarily healthy for us, we know we shouldn't be doing it, but there's a comfort to it all the same?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's a great book, Comfort Crisis.
If you haven't read that, I recommend it.
It's a good sort of overarching snapshot of how we've evolved a lot of these practices that are meant to support us, and they do.
Right.
But they're, you know, what I would call they're dualistic.
So we split things off, you know, I've got to have my exercise time or my mindfulness time or my alone time, you know, my solitude.
I've got to go and have reading time.
And they end up just being more things to tick off the list every day.
And so, you know, introducing new things like going for a walk outside rather than inside just seems like it adds to the burden.
You know, I've got to deal with weather now and change my clothes.
Yeah.
Whereas, again, if we maybe look back even 200 years, most people were exercising incidentally, as in you were just working outdoors.
We didn't call it exercise.
It was just work.
And I think it's the slow sort of insidious creep of those things where we've split things off into individual tasks.
So I would say, well, it's not the being outside that's probably the issue.
It's change and having to cope with something new.
It's also the fact that you've now segmented exercise off to be a special thing that you have to do.
You've invested time and effort and probably money in building the room and buying the bike, so you don't want to give that away.
It seems like you're going backwards.
And so we end up with just more stuff.
We all do it.
I've got a gym at home.
So even though I live on a 130-acre farm where chopping firewood is easily a task that I could do most days endlessly,
There is some mental sanctuary in going into the gym and kind of closing the door and doing your Zen-like activity, which is okay.
But I've got the time to do that.
I work from home, so I can segment that when the kids are at school.
Whereas most people don't.
They're trying to back to back to back to back with these activities.
Hi, it's Ryan from The Imperfects and I'm reaching out to you now because we need your help, gosh darn it.
Hang on, why do we need?
Sorry, no, I'm just making a plea to the listeners and viewers to ask them to subscribe to the show in whichever way they see fit because it really helps.
The more subscribers, the better we can make this show, am I right?
Yeah, but I don't think we need to...
I think we could just ask them politely.
Yeah, but if I use the emotional music...
I think the music's a bit much.
Is it?
Who's playing that music?
Doesn't matter who's playing the music.
The important thing is we're pulling at the heartstrings and asking them to do us a solid.
Could we not just ask them straight?
It would really help us if you guys subscribed because we would be able to make more of the show and make the show better.
Oh, and not use emotional manipulation.
Yeah.
Yeah, I reckon.
We can give it a go, but I doubt it'll work.
It's really interesting what you're saying because I feel like as a show, we've done lots of stuff on how we can work on ourselves.
And it sounds like from what I'm hearing you say, it sounds like that's all really good.
That's great.
And it's really important, helpful stuff.
But there's a whole part of it that's missing, which is the world around us, community, the systems, the environment.
I wonder if you could take me back to sort of your own personal career and where the sort of seeds of this within your own journey that this sort of started.
Yeah, sure.
Look, I started out as an athlete.
So when I was a teenager, I was into trail running.
I used to be cross country in those days before it became trendy.
So that and then got into the sort of triathlon in the mid to late 80s when it was a bit of a cool thing.
Still is, but got to have a lot more money these days.
Is that the Trevor Hendy era?
Yes, Trevor Hendy and, you know, the Kona was first, the Hawaiian Ironman was first sort of out, so, you know, Dave Scott.
Did you eat Nutri-Grain?
Strangely, or probably did as a kid.
Yeah.
Weet-Bix, I think.
That'll do.
Weet-Bix kid.
Nutri-Grain is very important.
I mean, I ate it.
Never became a triathlete.
Strangely, strangely.
So I was interested in sport and performance.
And then from there I think I did what most kids did in the 80s, which was, you know, you finished high school and you went to uni if you could.
And so I thought, well, what am I going to study?
I'm interested in sport.
I could either do physiotherapy.
Or they did a documentary, and I can't remember which channel it was on.
Some doc I was on, and they interviewed a guy called Jeff Bond, who was a sports psychologist at the Australian Institute of Sport.
And I thought, oh, that'd be pretty cool working as a psychologist as well.
So I think I put physiotherapy down on my university choices and I can't remember if I put it first or whether I spelt it wrong and put psychology.
Psychology, physiotherapy, I don't know.
There's a Y and a P and an H in there somewhere.
Yeah.
Anyway, I got into psychology and so studied sports psych at uni and kind of figured out as part of that, probably too late, it's actually really hard to make a living in sports psychology in Australia because most athletes are broke.
So I thought, well, what am I going to do with this qualification?
So I'd always had an interest in the military and thought, well, you know, surely they are interested in performance as well.
Maybe I could do sort of some sort of performance psychology in the military.
So I joined the army and served in the Australian Army Psychology Corps.
And, yeah, nearly 30 years later, I'm still serving.
Oh, really?
And I'm in the reserves now.
Yeah, so I went off on a career of saying, well, how do I apply this, you know, this master's level sports psychology career to military personnel?
Wow.
It took me about four years of service to get into Special Forces, and then I spent eight years from about 2004 through about 2011, 12, working in Special Operations Command, working with –
Special people, so selecting them, helping prepare and train them for deployment.
Obviously, the military was really busy at that period of time, so we'd just gone back into the Middle East in about 2003.
So you're part of the selection committee, basically, on who gets through that rigorous...
Correct, yeah.
Like entrance, what would you call it, exam?
Like test?
Torture?
No.
Torture.
Yeah.
Yeah, so most of the, well, there's two sort of special forces organisations in Australia.
Um, the commandos are over on the east coast and the SAS regiment are over on the west coast and they both run or used to run their own separate selection courses.
Um, so commandos was four weeks and, uh, the regiment was three weeks.
And, yeah, there's a pretty heavy sort of psych workup for that to make sure that we're choosing the right sort of people.
But then obviously that is then put to the test in the context of the selection course itself.
So we're looking for core characters, you know, core characteristics that we know are sort of signs of success in special operations.
After doing it for a while, did you come to sort of like recognize certain traits as soon as you meet someone that you go like, oh, I can tell you've got what it takes?
Not necessarily because the selection course itself is designed, most of us have a social persona, right?
So you come into a room, you meet somebody, you've got your game face on initially until you kind of relax and get to know people.
And so, of course, they know that they're going through a selection course.
So, of course, they've got their game face on.
And for them, you know, for Special Forces personnel, it's a critical sort of transition into a new career and higher pay and prestige.
So they've got the game face on.
So we do a battery of psych tests, some interviews, but then really the rubber hits the road when they get on the course.
So we spend, in most cases, we'd spend the first third of the course
Just maybe not wearing them down is the right word, but sandpapering off that sort of social.
The persona.
The persona that they're portraying, getting down to brass tacks, to real raw character.
And we do that through fatigue, exercise, constant tasks, constant challenges, mental and physical.
We used to give them puzzle books, you know, the things, you know.
Inch-thick puzzle books that have just got mazes and sums and basically let them sit there for three hours and fill in the puzzle books.
For no reason.
We weren't scoring it.
It was just like we just want to bore you senseless so that we can actually get you to a point of frustration with those processes.
Mind you, we'd be doing this at 2 o'clock in the morning.
I'll wake you up.
Let's go and do a puzzle book.
Oh, my God.
That's not what I expected torture to be like, but I've done that.
You've got high-achieving people that are driven to succeed, so they are very assiduous at doing the puzzle books and looking for approval.
And we run these courses mostly in what we call silent running, a bit like a loan, which we'll come back to.
There's no external feedback, no external positive or negative validation of how they're going.
They're just complete tasks with no feedback.
Correct.
Yep.
Endless tasks with no feedback so that the whole concept is to get rid of that social persona.
So we don't care about that.
We just want to know what you're like when it's just you and your head.
Do they know that's what you're looking for?
Mostly, yeah.
It's a bit like saying when people go on a loan, they know what being a loan's like.
Most people have a concept of what it's like, but until you're there and you're tired and you haven't slept well in three days and you're calorie deprived and you're with a group of people that you don't really know or like or – it's –
It reveals things.
It reveals things, absolutely.
Just to fill in the blanks for people who've never seen Alone, it's basically people volunteer themselves to go out, dropped in the middle of nowhere, basically, and they're all put in different spots, and then whichever one can essentially last the longest alone in the wilderness wins.
Correct.
And that could be 20 days, but it could be 100 days.
And they don't know how the other ones are going.
No feedback whatsoever.
Wow.
So, I mean, the military stuff is so...
I mean, that testing is so fascinating because...
I've often thought about the idea that we're all just walking around with this persona.
We're playing a character unconsciously, and it's almost very, very rare...
That we drop that character.
Absolutely.
I think even when we're by ourselves, we're conscious of who we want to be or the things we're trying to do.
And it's like, I mean, I did a project years ago, which was, I was writing a show, which was sort of about this theme.
And I remember trying to think about the times where I was truly myself and I didn't have the persona up.
And I struggled to think of a time that I'm truly myself.
That's a strange thing.
Oh, look, absolutely.
And I think one of the theories we have about personality is that it's socially reflected.
What I mean by that is you might think of yourself as funny, but you only know that you're funny because other people reflect.
They laugh when you crack a joke.
Yeah.
Without that reflection, you wouldn't know what – well, if you just cracked a joke in an empty room, well, nobody laughs.
So is it funny?
I don't know.
Is Amy a funny person or not?
Is it a funny joke?
So you need that social aspect of feedback to actually inform and construct your personality.
We know, for example, if –
When you raise kids, you know, kids will often smile performatively.
In other words, as they're getting older, they figure out that if they smile at their parents, they're more likely to get something.
Right?
So, you know, kids learn to smile.
Not because they're necessarily happy.
It's because, oh, this is quite functional.
They're not thinking that cognitively.
It's a socialization process.
So a lot of our personality, the way we think about ourselves is socially constructed and it evolves over time.
And the reason we kind of know that is through some of the debriefs for people that have been put in solitary confinement.
So part of the training we do in special forces is to teach people and prepare people for potentially being taken captive as a prisoner of war.
And so we talked to them about how, you know, what do we know about what happens to somebody's psychology or their personality when they're in long periods, I'm talking years, socially sort of isolated.
And one of the things we do know is that for many people, their personality kind of dissolves.
You know, they start to actually question, well, who am I?
Because they don't have any of that social feedback.
Yeah, wow.
Unless they can build a relationship with your guards.
It doesn't matter how minuscule or meek it is, you know, try and get them talking about anything.
Oh, that's part of the training.
Yeah.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Teaching people to leverage off, you know, learn the patterns and routines of the guards, try and work out their personalities, try and work out when it's daytime and nighttime.
So keep yourself occupied and socially engaged if you can just to keep yourself grounded.
Because the fear is you will lose your personality?
Yeah, you'll dissolve.
So we know people can obviously suffer some pretty significant trauma in those sort of spaces.
But part of it is because you just don't have the social connection.
We're social mammals.
We live and breathe through social connections.
Part of the connections that we talk about
I talked about earlier in terms of the disconnection we have now is loneliness.
People are incredibly lonely even though we're more digitally connected than ever.
So, yeah, coming back to the sort of training, it's a case of saying, well, you need to construct ways to try and keep building some sort of social reflection.
Otherwise, yeah, you might just go a bit crazy.
I've never heard on...
I don't think we've ever spoken about that.
I've never heard that the... Because we bloody bang on about social connection all the time and how important it is.
But I've never, I don't think, heard that the...
The risk of no social connection, like the other end, the extreme end of the spectrum, is that you almost forget who you are because you haven't got the feedback.
Correct.
That is terrifying.
Yeah.
Yeah, it does make me think of the episode we did with Sean Turnell, who was captured in solitary confinement for, I can't remember how long, but it was a long years, I think, in Myanmar.
And some of the things that he talked about in that episode, which is well worth listening to is...
How he did talk to the guards a lot and made friends with the guards.
And he also did an activity of recreating, using his memory to recreate social events from his life and almost in a granular detail.
It's really interesting hearing what he did.
He wasn't trained to, but kind of instinctively did.
And you meet the person that came out and I feel like that must have saved him.
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, the reality for most of us is, you know, how often do we spend any time alone?
You know, so most people, even if they say, oh, no, I went and stayed in a retreat or did Vipassana or something like that, you know, you still have other people around you and we forget that
Uh, social connection is more than just speaking and it's, you know, smiles and small interactions and waves and, uh, that they're still enough.
Even having your phone turned on, even if you don't use it, is enough of a psychological link to go, oh, but I could talk to somebody.
Because it makes me think about the sort of apocalyptic future that we sometimes get shown in films where it's like everyone's on a chair with virtual reality glasses on in their homes and interacting with the world that way with like an avatar in like a virtual world.
But, you know, there is a certain reality to that even today where a lot of people are bound to their house and for whatever reason that might be.
But obviously online connections have become a saviour for a lot of people.
Can you get the same connection through online interactions?
Look, the research seems to think that you can get a proxy, a pretty good proxy for that.
Again, I think it's probably the poor cousin of genuine connection in many ways.
There's a whole lot of things around, I guess, both psychological and biological connection, which we don't really have a complete handle on.
We tend to separate them out.
So for example,
And it's going to sound a little woo-woo, but we know that, you know, we are energetic beings, right?
We run on electricity biologically, but we also have a magnetic field around us.
You know, if somebody walks up behind you and stands right behind you, most of us sort of get a sense that it's very rare that people don't know that anyone's standing right behind you.
It might be that they're breathing on the back.
Your neck or something, but you get a sense that they're there.
There's a presence there.
Yeah, there's a presence.
Or if you're in a room, you walk into a dark room, sometimes you get a vibe, you know, it's like there's somebody here.
So all of that stuff, even though it sounds a bit woo-woo, we don't really have a handle on.
So when we talk about connection, we often just think we're talking about language and talking.
But we're also then discrediting all these other things.
So digitally, obviously you can't do that.
So we're kind of going back to that conversation we had initially about disconnection.
You know, is it just the fact that you're not in a room with somebody or is there some other stuff going on, some other patterns of disconnection?
Nature and sort of some of the ecosystems we evolved to be in that we've kind of discredited or said, oh, that's not really important.
But maybe it is.
Maybe it is.
I mean, I imagine as well, and maybe this is part of the training for military when they're in solitary confinement.
But I guess one of the other things that goes away is
Is just touching another person.
Absolutely.
Like the physical connection because we spoke to an intimacy coordinator actually recently for film and television, Ada O'Brien, and she was talking about like the importance of touch.
Massive.
So how does that play in even like a non-romantic sense?
Oh, huge.
Well, I think I walked in and shook all your hands, didn't I?
Yeah.
We know, you know, so the simple act of touching somebody means you're all now much more likely to help me out.
If I drop my folder on the ground, you're statistically more likely to help me pick my stuff up just because I shook your hand.
Because we've actually built a little tiny connection over and above what we would do on a digital platform.
So there's all sorts of those little things, again, that we just assume probably doesn't play an important role overall.
But when you then start stacking all these things on top of one another, that sense of some sort of energetic field,
Physical touch, being in the same room, being able to make eye contact with people, even smell, you know, smelling what somebody smells like.
I know it sounds a bit weird but, you know, we are programmed to do all of those things far more than we give credit to.
We live way too much in the cognitive realm and forget.
That, you know, we're animals too.
We do all the same things that dogs do and everything else.
We've just sort of suppressed all those senses.
Can I go back to the assessment and selection part of the military?
With all the training and all the selection criteria, what is the most common characteristic you see amongst resilient people?
Hughes planning his applications.
Well, there's a couple, but I think the primary one is probably being able to see the patterns, being able to read those patterns in the environment and adapt to see those patterns and adapt to them.
And is that like a broad statement around life or just like on that –
Well, in all the groups that I've worked with, people who can read the patterns in the environment that they're hoping to either get into or are in, if they can see the patterns, ecological, human, social, psychological, and then they can adapt and apply skill sets, that's when those two things line up and they end up with success.
What we would call resilience, but it's really just exceptional performance and ability to adapt to that space.
So we get a lot of special forces people, for example, who can take those skills from special forces and apply it to the business world.
So they can read the strategy, understand what we call in the military the human terrain, what's going on, who's who in the zoo, how do I help lead, shape,
Get to my end outcome.
And then I apply that skill set.
It's often people who don't make the transition really well, who either don't know themselves, or they can't read their internal patterns, or they can't read the external patterns very well.
And so they come back and it's very jarring.
It's like, hang on, this does not compute anymore.
I can think of a few people in my life who are really good at that in a social environment and they're the sort of people who you think, I can invite them to any event and they'll just find a way to...
Relate to whoever they're with, and it's not even that performative.
It's just natural to them.
Yeah, that's amazing.
It's ironic, because one of the selection activities we do certainly on the SAS selection course for offices
Is we pluck them out.
So they're in the field, they're dirty, they're grotty, they're filthy, they've been smashed physically, they've done all these puzzle books and other crazy tasks.
And then we take them out and we put them in a dinner party scenario.
Oh, wow.
They're still dressed in their filthy gear and we have all these extras who are dressed in bow ties and civilians and there's canapes and...
And suddenly they've got to perform socially.
Where's that show?
It's a great TV show.
Make a great show.
But, yeah, so they plucked out of that.
It's 9 o'clock at night.
They just think they're going to do another military activity, you know, strip and assemble a weapon or give a set of orders, and it's like now you're in a –
Embassy, you know, cocktail party.
Carry on.
You can see the discombobulated.
Yeah.
Thank God you're here.
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
I really want to ask you about, because you've sort of touched on throughout like things we can do differently or how we, but it'd be great to kind of get to a place where we go like, this is what you should do.
More or less, you know.
Push the reset button.
Well, on that...
If hypothetically you could go back in time and you could change one mistake in your eyes that humans made or one event or one fruit-themed technological device, is there one thing that you would go back and change that?
Tough question.
Probably not.
I think we are where we are.
I think the one thing I've learned about humans is that we are immensely capable of change.
And so I think there's always the –
Temptation to look back historically and try and change trajectory points.
But, you know, that's kind of a bit of a tough question.
It's an impossible scenario.
So I would rather say, what can we do now?
I think that what we can do now is say, okay, well, let's try and get a better read on where we're at, you know, as a species, if you want to call it that.
Better read on the environment we're operating in, the ecosystem that we're kind of living in, learn from the past and work out a trajectory to get back to that.
I mean, I think a good proxy is climate change.
People worry about, you know, how we're going to fix the planet.
My answer is really simple.
If you could change everyone's mind, we can all change our mind tomorrow to now.
It's pretty easy to mount an argument and say, I'm going to change your mind on something.
If everyone changed their mind about planting trees or doing something for the climate, we'd fix the whole thing overnight.
Well,
Nine billion of us on the planet now imagine if everyone out and just planted five trees tomorrow there's you know
There's 45 billion trees that just got planted.
So our capacity for change is actually unlimited.
It's only that psychology, that mindset that says, I have no power to change anything as an individual.
Yes, you're true.
But if we can communicate that, well, everyone can change their mind on stuff or learn something new, we could fix all sorts of stuff.
So that's a bit of a dodge on your question.
I mean, it was a ridiculous question really.
Trying to bring it back to reality and say, look, I think, you know, there's lots of things we can learn.
I think we're certainly on a trajectory that's now, you know, most of us I think are at least aware of some of these issues.
We're certainly talking more about mental health and why we're here and how we fix it.
So I think, well, one of the things that I can offer or people like me can offer is, well, let's look back and see what we've learned over the last 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years and find ways to implement it.
I mean, one of the biggest from this whole chat, the thing that's really kind of like, I don't know, that's impacted me, I guess, I'm trying to think of the word, but is the idea of what you're looking for in these special ops people, their ability to adapt to any environment and like that's a skill set.
I feel like that would be an incredible thing for us to learn
As humans, it's something that we're not really actively taught.
It's sort of, we're just expected to figure it out in many ways, like through school or work.
But I don't know, I can't think of any real world courses or anything that teaches us how to do that.
No, and it was always implicit learning, wasn't it?
You weren't sat down by the elders and go, right, we're going to teach you how to do this now.
So many Indigenous cultures to this day still teach through implied learning.
You know, you have to do something many, many times, sort of ponder, well, why am I doing this?
And the lesson was in the doing.
It wasn't in the talking.
And so I think, yeah, that implied learning is kind of...
Lost its relevance.
We kind of expect everything to be set out for us now in Western cultures.
Here's your explicit learning theory.
This is what you're going to have to learn in this course, or this is what you're going to learn by the end of the course.
And we've lost something in that.
And again, that's something we could probably take from many Indigenous communities is that there are processes that culturate people into these sorts of ways of being in the world.
That aren't just woo-woo, hippie, go and live in a teepee, weirdo stuff.
They're actually there for a really strong purpose.
And they were evolved practices over many thousands of years for a very specific reason, and that is because that's how humans are meant to work.
We used to call them rites of passage.
So you would have a rite of passage into adulthood, but you'd also have a rite of passage into parenthood and a rite of passage into elderhood.
There were many sort of ceremonies and sacred processes involved
In many Indigenous cultures.
There's a great book called The Dreaming Path, which is written by Paul Callaghan.
We spoke to Paul Callaghan a few years ago now, but that's a great book, exactly on what we can learn from Indigenous life.
Yeah, and as I say, we tend to...
I know it's a bit of a sensitive topic in Australia, and importantly so.
We tend to look at the Indigenous cultures and communities in Australia and say, oh, they learn so many things, but that's not for us.
Yeah, it's separate.
But, you know, if you go back into many – I'm just going to use the Northern European because that's my heritage –
If you go back into many of those cultures, it was all still there.
And in fact, the parallels with most Indigenous learning systems in the world are scarily, scarily similar.
It's all, it's the way humans have been forever.
It's what makes that book so brilliant, The Dreaming Path, is that exact reason.
It's surprising how relevant all the teachings are to today.
Absolutely.
We're all human, I guess.
We're all still human.
Most of our DNA is still only 25 or 30,000 years old.
Evolution doesn't keep up.
We've changed the world so dramatically in the last 30 years.
Is it any wonder that we aren't sort of coded for it anymore?
Hey, Ryan and Josh.
Yes.
Permission to advertise my own thing.
What is your thing?
Yes, please.
The Resilience Project.
Cool.
I mean, permission to get excited about your thing.
You know what I love?
When people come up to me and go like, hey, I just want to say the Resilience Project has completely changed my kid's life.
It's saved us.
Thank you so much.
And I just choose not to tell them that's got nothing to do with me.
I do the exact same thing.
Oh, thanks.
Well, that makes me very happy to hear that.
We have now partnered with 1,400 schools around Australia.
So I think for a lot of people, it's like, yeah, we would love to do a wellbeing program.
But my first question is a...
Principal and school
People do know it's going to work, and Monash University found that after six years of doing the Resilience Project, the chance of a child developing an anxiety disorder has decreased by 34%, and the chance of developing depressive symptoms decreased by 47%.
It's so incredible, not surprising, but amazing to have the numbers.
So if you want to see how the Resilience Project Schools Wellbeing Program could work for your school in 2027, please head to our website, theresilienceproject.com.au and you'll find everything you need to know about our wellbeing program there.
Which, I mean, it kind of makes me think of Alone because watching Alone, it's so educational.
It's just like, and to state the obvious, that is not a way for most of us to be able to live all the time.
So what have you learned that we can apply to today's world from that show?
Well, I think much of what we already just talked about, I mean, I think it's one of these amazing, unique opportunities to kind of put people into a unique social experiment.
And people go in often thinking that they're going to come out really unhealthy.
And if they get a reasonable amount of food, they actually come back pretty healthy.
Blood works and other things.
We've had people go on the show who may have had a medical condition, like a cardiovascular condition, where they're taking a certain medication, for example, and they actually come off the medication.
Wow.
We don't have tons of science on that, but we kind of can predict, well...
If you're not eating crappy refined food and you're not living in air conditioning and you're not, you know, sort of living a high stress life with poor sleep, well, you might actually get healthier.
So there's a couple of caveats.
Food is one, sleep is another.
Sleep is a massive part of moderating that cycle.
But, yeah, there's a lot of those conditions which then become conducive to humans becoming human again.
They start to re-sync with those patterns of sunlight and seasonality and the only missing one is social contact, which is obviously the whole context of the show.
You see the people who do really well seem to build relationships with the environment around them.
I think of Gina Chick who would see having conversations with the river and with mountains and with the clouds and with the animals around her.
Is that something we've lost as well?
Absolutely, yeah.
So there's this concept of the more-than-human world, which I think we just talk about loosely as nature.
Most of us who've ever kept a pet know that you can have a relationship with nature.
Most animals are easily able to form a relationship with them.
But that next level of being able to form relationship with place –
I mean, again, going back to our conversation about Indigenous sort of learning systems, often, you know, the knowledge was buried in the landscape.
You knew how the rivers had formed because there was a story about that.
You interacted with the rivers or you interacted with the trees because that's where you collected harvest.
So you intimately had a relationship with these places.
If not just because of necessity, because you needed to survive and drink water and collect food, but because they supported you.
If you were able to read those patterns, you could sort of dodge the bullet, so to speak.
You know, you could know when a weather system was coming in and prepare for it.
Well, you knew when the
Ice was going to freeze over and you had to have enough supplies of food in order to predict that and get through that initial period before you could walk out and ice fish, for example.
So we had these relationships with place that allowed us to actually thrive rather than constantly being in some sort of fight with nature.
How do we suppress it?
How do we stop it?
How do we make it do what we want it to do, which involves more energy, more thinking, more sort of –
Geoengineering solutions as opposed to, well, how do we actually go with the flow?
Makes me think of, I quite obsessively measure my sleep and the quality of my sleep and I take magnesium before I go to bed and do all the stuff that we're meant to do.
And I get a sleep score like out of 100 every single morning, and the first thing I do when I wake up is look and see how I went.
The only time I've ever got above 95 or 96, first time ever in like five years of wearing this watch, was when I was –
Camping, which I don't like doing, in Mount Kosciuszko in the snow, in the most uncomfortable, like we were on an angle where we managed to get a tent and it was freezing cold.
I'm in my clothes and I woke up to a sleep score of 96.
Did you have your water pillow?
I didn't have my water pillow.
There you go.
Wow.
I didn't have my magnesium.
That's nice.
All the things I usually do.
I didn't even have a pillow.
There was no pillow.
And I'm sleeping like in between two other men, one I know well, the other one I've never met in my life before.
We are literally touching shoulders as we're sleeping.
The best sleep I've had since I've had this watch is just five years.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, picking up on that point, I mean, there's a reason why many special forces personnel still sleep on the floor when they get home.
Yeah.
I find them far more, you know, they get better sleep.
They actually, once you're out in that environment and you start to synchronise with all of those patterns, it becomes a self-licking ice cream, as we say in the military.
And it's kind of like, oh, that's what we're supposed to do.
We've been doing this for 190,000 years.
We've been sleeping on the ground.
That's actually where we're supposed to be.
I'm sleeping outside tonight.
Let's hold it together, shoulder to shoulder.
But look, yeah, there's lots of reasons to sort of say, do we have hard science?
No.
But from a common sense logic perspective, well, you know, maybe we were designed to actually deal with some discomfort.
That's the thing that feels so obvious from the conversation, but we have...
Strive so hard to remove any discomfort at any point in our life.
I've absolutely fallen flat in the last couple of years, especially we've had some challenges at home with family stuff.
So I feel like I've adjusted the other side to go, I'm going to do everything else I can, everything I can control to make sure there's...
Because there's so much discomfort in family stuff, I'm going to try and create so much comfort in every other area of my life.
But I've definitely gone way too far and think about it way too much and stress about it way too much.
And I think it's sort of had this opposite effect for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's what I think as well.
I think it's, coming back to that book, The Comfort Crisis, it's actually discomfort that
Kind of pushes the reset button in many ways and says to your body and your mind, um, Oh, actually we're a species that's learned to survive, but we, we've always faced adversity in doing that.
And once you take the adversity away, your body sort of goes and your mind goes, well, okay, I'm just falling out now.
You know, you can kind of chill out and just wander aimlessly.
And, you know, perhaps not so surprisingly, we now see, you know, much higher rates of
Lifestyle-based illnesses from a physical perspective and much higher rates of mental health issues from a cognitive perspective.
Yet we've taken away all the discomfort.
There's something missing there.
Doesn't add up.
No.
Over the last four or five years, I would say the number one thing for my
Number one?
Yeah.
Maybe that's going a bit far, but definitely up there with the top things for my own mental health and when I've been struggling has been gardening.
Yep.
I love it.
And winter I find a bit harder because there's less to do.
Yep.
But I've been wanting to...
Ask someone about the science behind gardening.
I can talk anecdotally that going out there and checking it, especially in spring when things are starting to grow and then there's things to do.
And there's little jobs and this monitoring.
My wife and I, we're turning into, we live in Preston in Melbourne and there's a lot of nonnas and old men who walk around in their dressing gowns.
In the morning, checking the garden.
And now, like in our 30s, my wife and I have taken to dressing gown walks around the garden with a coffee.
Did you have to buy one especially?
Actually, we were in the garden too.
My gardening gown.
My gardening gown.
But it's one of our favourite things of the week is to spend a little bit of time just like checking on each individual plant to see how it's going.
I'd love to ask you a bit about what is going on there from a mental health point of view.
Why does that feel so good?
Well, a couple of reasons.
I mean, you've just identified a social aspect to it.
You've identified with people who are elderly and clearly care for their community and care for parts of the community.
I guess the ecosystems within the community that are important.
Many of those, you know, we use the word nono, so I'm assuming you're talking sort of, you know, Italian, et cetera.
Yeah, a lot of Greek and Italian.
Yeah, who all come from small villages, who all shared produce, who all, you know, had cultural systems that supported a village lifestyle.
So there's probably something about that you're tapping into as well.
I'd like to see the picture of the dressing gown first to double check.
But from, I guess, a physiological perspective, coming back to what we've been talking about, I mean, I think the minute – and most people are the same.
Would you prefer to go for a walk in a park or in a city?
Most people will say a park.
Because immediately, you know, I think at that embedded sort of DNA genetic level, we know that being able to read systems and by that I mean seasons.
Understand how plants work, how to grow things and produce things.
It just ticks a whole lot of sort of survival boxes for us, doesn't it?
I can provide for myself.
I can grow food.
I know how that works.
I know when to plant things.
I'm actually producing something with my hands, which is tangible and actually sustains me being food.
And more importantly, you made the reference that there's not as much to do in winter.
Well, that's only because the Western system isn't really great at producing crops that are transportable in winter.
So if you get back into, again, Northern European cultures, for example, and I can only talk about them.
But there's tons of things you can grow in winter.
Yeah.
It's just that no one produces seeds for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because why would you need to?
There's no mass produced sort of cropping system designed to produce any of these vegetables because they don't transport well, they don't store.
So there's no commercial value to them.
But in a small village in Italy, up in the Alps, for example, I'll tell you, lots of things are growing in winter.
Spaghetti.
Wheat's a winter crop here.
There's lots of things that I think, again, we've kind of been –
Denied is not the right word, but we've lost the knowledge of how to, you know, engage in those systems through what is perhaps inadvertently commercialisation of those products.
Yeah.
Yeah, but absolutely there's a whole field of therapy called horticultural therapy, which, you know, came out of ironically out of World War I and World War II.
So a lot of...
Repatriation hospitals back in the UK, you know, when people were injured and they were taken back behind, you know, sort of the front lines to rehabilitate.
They were often put in hospitals who had massive gardens
And part of the initial sort of treatment was just get them involved in, you know, outside, get them outside.
Solar therapy was actually legitimate in those days, getting people out in the sunshine.
Surprise, surprise.
So a lot of the retreats in the Alps in Europe were designed around getting people out in the sunshine at altitude in the cold.
Can you talk about the science of the sun for us and why that is so powerful for our mental health?
Yeah, so we're energetic creatures.
And again, vitamin D is synthesized primarily on our skin.
And the most powerful source of synthesizing vitamin D is sunlight.
So when UV hits our skin, it synthesizes through melatonin.
People take melatonin to go to sleep at night.
We need to take melatonin to go to sleep at night because most of us don't see a sunrise in the morning.
The specific wavelength of light coming up in the morning
If it hits the back of your retina, it triggers the clock genes in your genes to say, oh, we're awake now.
We need to fire up all those metabolic processes that start the daylight cycle.
And by the way, we'll put a little alarm clock for about 12 hours from now, 12 to 15 hours from now, to go to sleep.
So in 12 to 15 hours, we need to trigger the release of melatonin.
So if you don't get that sunlight signal in the mornings, you don't get the sleep signal at night.
And then most of us then hijack it by staring at a screen at nighttime anyway.
So then it resets the clock again.
So we're just lying awake at night.
Trying to go to sleep.
What do we do to supplement that?
We take melatonin.
Magnesium is a precursor for melatonin.
And so we've kind of hijacked this whole thing to try and put Band-Aids on it.
But coming back to growing plants, I mean, they operate in the same solar cycles as we do.
You already know that you said we plant certain things at springtime and things start to grow.
There are certain plants that are genetically coded to grow at certain times of the year, both from a temperature and sunlight perspective.
Why are we any different?
Yeah.
Why aren't we meant to operate on a 12-month cycle?
Well, of course we are.
Hormonally, we're no different.
Plants operate pretty much the same way we do.
They just use sunlight to convert through their chloroplasts.
And generate electricity or energy in that form.
We just do it, you know, the inverse way.
We take in nutrients and we use the sunlight to trigger the hormones that digest the food.
So...
What, with Alone, well, I'm interested to know how that came about in the first place.
Were you, you'd done SAS, is that right?
Yeah, so my entry into reality TV was through an army doctor, basically.
And a mate of mine, Sam, g'day.
And so I got out of the military, out of Special Forces, was just doing some reserve stuff.
Got a phone call from a production company out of the blue, really, and said, oh, we're looking to employ a psychologist to come and work on a reality TV show that works.
It's going to take people into a relatively austere, demanding environment, kind of starve them of calories.
Would you be interested?
I kind of went, TV, I don't know.
Anyway, I knew that this person was married to a mate of mine, so I rang Sam.
I said, what's going on?
He said, just put in a quote.
It'll be fine.
So that was Survivor when Survivor first came back to Australia.
Oh, that was Survivor.
Yeah, Survivor Australia.
So I worked on that for a few seasons.
I guess people liked my approach to sort of the way of supporting people on the show, which is very much based on the ex-military sort of model.
And it went from there.
So I sort of picked up a whole heap of other sort of similar survival-y type shows.
Funnily enough, I was a bit of a fan of Alone myself, the US version.
And I remember having a chat to an executive producer a couple of years ago.
I think I was working on Love Island of all shows.
Yeah.
They're saying, oh, have you seen this show alone in the States?
You know, it's awesome.
It'd be great if it came to Australia.
I mean, if it ever comes to Australia and you end up working on it, give me a call.
And so strangely enough, he gave me a call and said, hey, guess what?
So were you working on Gina Chick's season?
Yes, I've worked on all four seasons so far.
So what was it about Gina that in your professional point of view made her so incredible?
Experience.
Well, be careful not to strain to professional boundaries here because obviously I'm technically her psychologist.
But look, I think Gina was pretty open in saying that her capacity to kind of align herself with those patterns of nature and having had experience for many, many years in already doing that was probably the major skill set.
She could come into this with
Some experience of reading the patterns of nature, of forming a relationship to nature, as you said as well, that gave her the upper hand and that she was never really alone.
It sort of seems like people on Alone and maybe in military situations as well, people really miss being out there.
What is going on there?
I think what I would say, having talked to most of the contestants on these shows and worked in other places like Special Forces and Antarctic Expeditioners,
It's actually missing that relationship.
You know, it's a form of grief in some ways.
You know, you've formed a very intimate relationship with a particular place in a particular ecosystem that supported you to survive, which is pretty amazing.
And then you just go back to normal everyday life.
So it wouldn't be normal if you had an intimate relationship with somebody, let's say the military, where your life depends on these other group of people.
Would you miss them?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
And many, I think, ex-service personnel would identify with that sense of loss, that brotherhood, sisterhood, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, even I experienced it as a psychologist.
We're not removed from that either.
Yeah, there's a sense of loss, which is not acknowledged by the general community.
So in the military context, it's, oh, we go back to your normal everyday life.
You go back to being a civilian.
But you can't ever really do that because you've been fundamentally changed by the experience.
So you're not the same person and you're coming back with fresh eyes to see what, you know, your family, your community is now, how they're living, and you can't unsee that.
And I think the same thing applies for alone.
You know, people go and have this experience where perhaps they –
Fortunate enough to really see what it's like to be just a single human trying to live in that ecosystem and see how reliant we are on that ecosystem to allow us to survive there.
And then you just come back and just move on to normal, you know, join the queue, buy your latte in the mornings.
It's like you can't undo that.
There's a certain type of loneliness that I've experienced in different parts of my life.
And that is the kind of confusing and surprising loneliness that you sometimes feel when you're in a big city by yourself and surrounded by thousands and thousands of people.
Yep.
And if you're traveling or even not, but if you live by yourself and there are all these people around you and you're making an effort to go out every day, but you still feel lonely despite being surrounded by people,
What's going on there?
Yeah.
Well, probably a couple of things.
I think with the quality of the relationships we have now, again, not individually at fault, but perhaps culturally at fault, we don't build those village-minded sort of structures whereby you are intimately reliant on
Um, the people around you and intimately know their life stories from, you know, births, deaths, marriages, funerals, where people are buried.
Um, we, we don't have that anymore.
So we are disconnected, I think, to some degree from those cultural fabrics, which, which, um, allow us to feel at home and at place and know that we can call on the social structures.
But also, you know, the second layer of that, of course, is we're now disconnected from place as well.
You know, cities are fairly impersonal.
There's not a lot of social structures or cultural structures in cities.
They're just, you know, concrete and roads designed from an engineering perspective.
Nothing against engineers.
My dad's one.
Um, but you know, we, we used to, if you go to some of the Pacific islands, they, they, their gravestones are all in the front of their houses, you know, so they buried their local, you know, their, their family, they stay with them.
So they're never alone because they've got the spirits and the energies sort of and the memory of people are omnipresent.
They're there all the time.
So, you know, cities have become very impersonal and very culturally sort of blank slates in a lot of times.
Which is why you see people, I think, craving for what's called in the literature the third room or the third place.
They want to go to cafes or they want to go to libraries.
They want to go to social spaces just to be around people because they're craving that connection, not just with people but also with the culture that's embedded in them.
Place.
You go to a coffee shop because you like the vibe, right?
Not just because the person behind the counter smiles at you nicely.
You like the vibe.
And there's something about that, which I think is embedded in us from a DNA perspective that allowed us to thrive.
You know your place.
You're embedded in the place.
You're part of the place.
And if you want to get really esoteric about it, one of the questions I often ask people is, where does your self, that word in quotation marks, where does it start and stop?
Is it at the layer of your skin?
We're coming back to our conversation about reflected personality.
How do you construct your view of yourself?
Then is that just contained to you or do you exist in the minds of your family and friends and they're thinking about you?
And so yourself is not just you physically, although that's what we're taught.
Yeah.
It's you socially and culturally and embedded in place as well.
You grow things, you know, it becomes an extension of you.
They're your trees, aren't they?
Your vegetables.
You actually then consume them so they become part of you.
The cycle of actually being embedded in a place is more than just a metaphorical.
It's an actual physical thing.
Yeah.
It's sort of like that when you are feeling that loneliness, especially if you're in a foreign city and you just feel so...
Distant from any sense of self or home or what you're describing.
And then like a barista at a cafe is really nice to you.
It is like an explosion.
It's like, oh, thank you.
You have no idea how important that was.
We're drawn to it like magnets.
Yeah.
Hard-coded for that sense of connection, not just psychologically but socially, culturally, ecologically.
We're drawn to it.
And I think that's just because we were hardwired to know that that's how you survive.
That's how you actually survive.
We've perhaps been lulled into this false sense of security by saying, if I have all the technology and I've got a supermarket down the road, I'm safe.
I've been to war zones where people pretty quickly realise that that really matters, but your neighbours do.
I never expected... My kids have just started school.
One of my oldest kids just started school.
Cool.
And the thing I... Yeah, it's awesome.
And I did not expect...
I drop him off...
When I drop him off...
It's the best part of my week is walking through that school ground and saying hello to all the other parents and some new kids that I've just met that are becoming his friends.
I take him to the classroom.
I ask a kid about something and we have like a running joke from the day before and I say a couple of words to a couple of other parents on the way out and then I go off on my day.
It is honestly the best part of it.
And I'm getting like tingles thinking about how much I love seeing those people that I've just...
Started to make this year
That feeling of belonging there that feeling of community um that feeling of us all having a collective connection to the place to the school yeah but also to a purpose of why we're all there
It just nothing makes me feel as good as that at the moment
You've ticked all the boxes, haven't you?
You've got social parenting, so raising the next generation, a sense of place, which often schools are really great at.
Connection into a like-minded group of people, the village, that are all raising kids together.
That old saying, it takes a village to raise kids.
Well, of course it does.
It's not just because you need babysitters at nine o'clock at night, but it's because
You actually need this interaction with other parents to go, am I doing this right?
Is this okay?
Am I normal?
Yeah, we're facing the same stress.
We've just sort of discredited a lot of that, segmented it out.
Absolutely.
They're the things that cement you into place.
And my wife and I have moved to Northeastern Victoria probably 10 years ago to do exactly that, you know, to get to a smaller town where everybody kind of knows your business.
And that's, you know...
Sort of discredited in most of society.
It's like, why would you not want people to know your business?
Because they'll support us.
It's called building social capital.
We know their business and we can look after them and in return they'll look after us.
And, you know, we recently just bought a house in town.
But, you know, before we'd even moved in, we'd had three people go, oh, we know that house.
You know, such and such lived there for five generations and they lived there and we've had Christmases on those front porches and stuff.
It's kind of like, okay, so there's actually a history to this house.
When you buy a house, you just think you're buying a house, right?
But now we're buying a part of the community as well.
Yeah.
And it's our part of the fabric of other people's lives, not just our lives.
Mm-hmm.
And that was a little bit spooky at first, but the more I think about it, it's like, that's pretty cool.
We actually now have responsibility for maintaining some of those memories in that particular place.
There's trees planted there that were planted by previous owners and there's a story to that.
Amazing.
The people who this conversation really resonates with them, they're thinking, yep, that makes complete sense to me.
And they want to start doing some things to align themselves, everything you've just spoken about, without making it a stressful routine that's in your calendar.
And there are just a few things you think of are just easy things to just start doing.
Yeah, I think the first one is just take notice.
So, you know, A, get outside whenever you can, even if it's for 10 minutes in the morning, you know, and start to try and, yeah, read those patterns, what's happening in the world around you, not just on your phone but, you know, in the news feed.
But go outside and see what the sun's doing today.
What's the weather doing today?
Hmm.
Um uh
You know what's going on at the school when you drop the kids off
What's one of the key events in the
You know sometimes it's feels like it's small fry and it's not that important but in in a community sense they're the things that keep the fabric you know glued back together
So just taking notice and allocating time.
I agree.
I don't think stacking it on as an extra tick-the-box activity, but making it an incidental activity that you can do.
Most of us can get outside and just take notice of what the clouds are doing today, where's the weather coming from.
We always check the weather on our app.
My wife always says, what's the weather going to be today?
I say, look out the freaking window.
You've got a five kilometre view from our front windows.
Have a look.
Sorry, Eliza.
But, you know, just getting back into those patterns of what humans have probably always done, which is just to take notice, be curious, and think about, well, you know, what of the patterns that I'm about to do today are actually sustaining me from a human perspective and what are actually just ticking boxes, activities that, you know, I have to do because…
I have to pay the bills and we all have those.
But try and push the dial slowly from the have to do's to the, I have to do my mindfulness today.
Or could you do mindfulness outside on the grass, you know, watching the sun?
And sort of slowly move it across.
It's hard.
I get it.
I mean, I've got two kids.
I've got a mortgage.
I've got a job.
I struggle.
And I've got 30 years of psychology and all these cool experiences behind me.
But
I think the only way we can do it is to keep just trying to push the needle.
Yeah.
Re-evaluate and re-check in and then talk to like-minded people.
Go.
How are you finding it?
What's working for you?
Well, thank you so much, Mark.
I think this will resonate with so many people and I feel like it will make such a positive impact on certain people's lives.
So thanks so much.
Pleasure.
Talk about it any time, all day.
Thanks, Mark.
That was awesome.
Thank you.
Ciao.
The Imperfects.com.au
A show made on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people, and we pay our respects to elders past and present.
The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you're struggling, please see a healthcare professional or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
