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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
How Kindness Boosts Your Immune System, The Power of Visualisation & The Importance of Empathy with Dr David Hamilton #602
01:46:14
This is the time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind and spend time with the people we love.
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- [00:01]
David Hamilton
There was a study on doctor visits over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu and they participated in it was called a care Study, Consultation and Relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition was was 50% higher than everyone else. And it just came down to empathy, how it made them feel and what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system.
- [00:39]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast Feel Better Live More.
- [00:52]
This is the time of year, at least in the uk, when people are gearing up for Christmas. Now I'm well aware aware that Christmas represents different things to different people and of course not everyone chooses to celebrate it. But there is no question that in many countries around the world this is a time of year that reminds us to be grateful, kind and spend time with the people we love. So to celebrate, I thought I would re release a conversation that took place on this podcast almost six years ago now with the wonderful David Hamilton. David is a scientist, researcher and someone who is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on the science of kindness. He's also the author of multiple best selling books including why kindness is good for you and how your mind can heal your body. Now this conversation was actually recorded all the way back in February 2020, one month before the start of COVID But as with most of the conversations on my podcast, the content within it is timeless and just as relevant today as it was when we first recorded it. In our conversation we explore many different themes including how empathy and kindness can impact various markers of our health, including our immune system and cardiovascular system, why David calls oxytocin the kindness hormone, how exactly we can use visualization to improve the quality of our lives, the science of the placebo effect, the importance of connection and empathy in health care, and the phenomenal ripple effect of kindness whereby one act of kindness can lead to 125 more. David is such a wonderful human being who is doing his very best to help create a kinder and more compassionate world. And I think this conversation is perfect for the current time of year. And I hope that it serves as a gentle reminder that being kind is not only good for the world around us, it's good for ourselves as well.
- [03:19]
David Hamilton
So you've come down from Dunblane, central Scotland. Famous latterly for Andy Murray and Jamie Murray, the tennis players, and obviously for the school shooting several years ago. Really lovely place, Dunblane. I took up tennis when I moved there in my mid-40s. I'd never played tennis before.
- [03:36]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Because of the Murray brothers?
- [03:38]
David Hamilton
Because of the Murray brothers. See, it's frowned upon if you don't. If you're fit and healthy and you don't play tennis, it's kind of frowned upon.
- [03:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah.
- [03:46]
David Hamilton
Picked up a racket for the first time in my mid-40s and I was awful. And now, well, I'm working up through the league. So I've been doing a lot of mental exercises, visualization, a lot of training and stuff. So I love it.
- [03:57]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
That's fantastic.
- [03:58]
David Hamilton
I play three, four times a week.
- [03:59]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It's so interesting that this small town, Dunblane. I wonder if we compare the tennis participation rates in Dunblane, you know, the home of Andy and Jamie Murray or certainly the former home of them with the rest of the United Kingdom. I wonder if it's artificially skewed upwards.
- [04:18]
David Hamilton
Probably. Definitely. You know, it's a really thriving tennis community.
- [04:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I love it. Oh, fantastic. Well, you mentioned a couple of things there which we'll probably come to later on. But David, I think I'm really fascinated by your journey. So you started working in the pharmaceutical industry and now you don't.
- [04:42]
David Hamilton
Yeah.
- [04:43]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So why don't you start by saying what you do now and then sort of share a bit of that story. What happened and how did you end up here today?
- [04:49]
David Hamilton
Yeah, So I basically write books that really broadly cover the different ways that your mind and emotions and your behavior has physical effects, health giving effects on the body. So I've written a series of books on it. I give a lot of talks on it and really my interest in that, in fact, if I wind back even further, my interest in the pharmaceutical industry was the placebo effect. But the interest in that actually was born when I was about 11 years old. My mom had postnatal depression and she was suffering terribly and it wasn't really understood. This was in the mid-70s after my youngest sister was born. I've three sisters. My youngest sister was born in 1976. Postnatal depression was not well understood at the time and my mom didn't really get the right treatment. In fact, the psychiatrist she was sent to to see said, give yourself a shake. But asking a woman with postnatal depression to give herself a shake is like asking Someone with a broken leg to run it off, I suppose. And my mom really, it really shattered her self esteem and she would feel really low about herself and like she's just not a strong person. And she suffered terribly for a few years. And as a young child I could tell my mom was struggling and I didn't really know what was wrong. And I remember one day I'd only just started secondary school and this might sound really corny, I don't know if I bumped my bag off the shelf, but a book fell off the shelf and it was called the Magic Power of youf Mind. And I'm just 11 years old. Magic Power of youf Mind, Walter Germain. And I thought, I bet that can help my mom. So I just took it, I put it in my bag and I didn't know you're supposed to join a library, you know, get the little yellow card stamp. But it totally helped my mom. It didn't cure depression in a day, but it gave her tools and strategies like what we now call mindfulness. It gave her those kind of things that helped her navigate a course through difficult times. So as I grew up in my teenage years, my mom would often use affirmations and she would do meditation and she'd say things like, I can do it. It's all in the mind. Mind over matter. So having these conversations with my mom, it's no surprise that my interest became the power of the mind and what your mind can do and the effect your mind has on your body. So when I ended up working in pharmaceutical industry developing drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer, most of my colleagues would be celebrating when you hear that one of the drugs that we've participated in is working. But I was so fascinated with how many people were improving on placebos. And it was so interesting to me. And I think because my mom had learned about mental strategies that could help her a little bit navigate that course through some of those difficult days. So I was so fascinated. After four years of really, really my own many research projects, just reading and learning everything I could, I decided to resign. Because my passion then was to educate people on, to write and to speak, to educate on how we can harness this overall effect to improve our health and to make life a little bit better for us.
- [07:59]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that. It is a fascinating story. When your mum was unwell and you brought home that book about the power of the mind, you know, how old were you and what were you interested in at school at that time?
- [08:14]
David Hamilton
I was 11 years old. I just started Secondary school. But my main, my passion, I guess, at school, if you could call it a passion when you're 11, was mathematics. And so when I went to high school, it was maths and science was my big things. I really.
- [08:31]
Used the word. I hated English. And it's funny, if someone had said to me as a child, you will write lots of books one day, I'd have laughed at them. Me writing books, because it was just maths and science. It's all I was interested in.
- [08:43]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Well, that's interesting because you picked up that book for your mum at the age of 11. Now, look, my kids aren't yet 11, my son's nine. And I'm sort of gonna guess that 11 is still at that age where still naive enough to kind of believe in stuff and have faith, let's say. And I'm just wondering, you know, as you got through your education and, you know, studied science more and more to a higher and higher degree, did you ever start to get skeptical about the importance of the mind? Because it's not really something we're taught at school, it's not something we're taught in science, it's not something we're taught at medical school. And a lot of your work now is showing the beautiful science that actually exists around kindness, around the placebo, around the power of the mind. So I'm super fascinating. Did you go through this period of skepticism somewhere and then come out the other side or what happened?
- [09:43]
David Hamilton
Surprisingly, not so much. What I would say is I just forgot about it. Yeah, you know, you get so. I mean, I got so engrossed in my degree. You know, I did chemistry then my PhD was organic chemistry. And you get so engrossed in it that I actually just forgot, really. I remember reading Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of Positive Thinking when I was halfway through my PhD and it almost reminded me of the passion I had. I remember, you know, I was literally in the middle of my second year of my PhD and all of a sudden reading this book ignited my passion. It was the memory I had of. I'm so interested. At the time, the book was just about positive thinking, but it wasn't just about positive thinking.
- [10:31]
I looked at that as not just about positive thinking. That I'll say positive things and positive things happen. It was more about the attitude that you were bringing to situations to change how you felt about something. And that's the message I got. And I thought, this is what I. And So during my PhD, I started to really dream, daydream. I suppose that one day I would write a book about the mind, and I had no idea what I would write about me. Right. Even at the time, the idea of writing. But it just seemed like something I knew I had to do one day.
- [11:05]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So you're working for a pharmaceutical company. You're there with your team, with your colleagues, trying to develop drugs that have been designed to help people. You said something about the placebo effect, which I find super interesting. So for people who are not familiar, the way we often analyze drugs is we do something called a randomized control trial. So very, very crudely speaking, you take two groups of people.
- [11:32]
Let's say there's 200 people there, and you're testing a drug for blood pressure, and 100 people get the drug for blood pressure, 100 people don't they get just a sugar pill. Is that right? And then you see who has. You know, has there been a statistically significant increase or benefit in one of the groups, that is the group who's taking the drug? Ideally, I guess, if that's what you're studying and it's done. Because often placebo has been. Certainly my interpretation of this as a medic is that, oh, if it's just the same as placebo, then the drug doesn't work, is the very simplistic explanation. And if it's beyond that, to a certain degree, we're like, okay, this drug actually works. It's beyond the kind of placebo thing. Right. In almost a derogatory way. But nonetheless, if you think about it, even if in that hundreds, let's say, that group who don't get the drug, a hundred people who've got blood pressure or high blood pressure, if 10 of them get better on taking the placebo and 20 get better on taking the pharmaceutical drug, well, the placebo is still doing something. Right?
- [12:41]
David Hamilton
Yeah.
- [12:41]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And is that what happened with you? You thought, hold on a minute. Well, how can we explain that?
- [12:46]
David Hamilton
Pretty much. And seeing it? Because I was a chemist so close to building the drug, I mean, literally organic chemists like me, it's like adults who play with Lego blocks, but instead of taking Lego blocks of different shapes and sizes and assembling them into shapes, we take building blocks of different shapes and sizes called atoms. But the principle is the same, sticking them together. So I was so close to the actual. The chemistry of it, and I just found it so fascinating that large numbers of people were improving on the placebos. And I remember asking my colleagues, and they would just dismiss it. Oh, it's just a placebo effect.
- [13:24]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Just the placebo effect.
- [13:25]
David Hamilton
And it was a sweeping movement of the right hand, even left hand. I think you learn it on your first day. It's just a placebo effect. And I came to realize that nobody actually understood it at all. They had no idea how it really worked. So that's why curiosity. I wanted to understand what happens. And now we actually understand that for a number of different conditions, when a person believes they're receiving a drug, the brain produces its own natural substances to deliver what they expect. So, for example, if someone takes a painkiller, a placebo, but they think it's a painkiller and it works, it can work really, really well, depending on the language or empathy used by the person who suggested they take it. But the reason why it works isn't just, as my colleague said, it's not really. They're not getting better, they just think they're getting better. But in actual fact, believing that this is a drug caused their brain to produce natural versions of morphine. So morphine is an opiate. We have our natural versions, and they're called endogenous opiates, meaning they're endogenous to you, they belong to you. So the brain prod endogenous opiates because you believe something. So the reduction in pain, for example, isn't just all in the mind. It's a real physical change caused by real chemical changes in the brain produced by what you expect is supposed to happen when you take this little pill. And it was that type of thing, realizing there's a scientific basis for belief, and it was building the evidence. And I spent hours in the library, in the company, just researching, gathering all the papers I could find. And it was just so interesting. And I thought, no one really knows about this. Professionals, laypeople don't really understand.
- [15:04]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Did we almost not want to know about it because it didn't fit our societal narrative that we're trying to find new and better technologies, whether it's a drug, whether it's another treatment that's going to help. But it can't just be the power of positive thinking, right? I mean, I guess you find what you're looking for, right? So if people aren't looking for that, it's. It's easy to.
- [15:30]
Diminish it and just think it doesn't matter. And I've got to say, I think still, as a medical profession, I don't think we take the placebo seriously enough. I mean, what do you think? Do you think things have changed in the last 10, 20 years?
- [15:45]
David Hamilton
It's definitely changing. I think when I left the pharmaceutical industry back in 1999, so just over 20 years ago, and it's definitely changing. People are far more aware of it, of the way in which. Even the way you talk to someone, how that can make them feel. In fact, there was a study on doctor visits, over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu, and they participated in, it was called a care study, Consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition was 50% higher than everyone else. And it just came down to empathy, how it made them feel, and what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system.
- [16:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And I think that's the key, isn't it, that it's not just in your head, it's changing things biologically, physiologically.
- [16:52]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [16:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Dave. When I hear that, it reminds me of something that I often say. I've said it to the public before, I've said it when I teach doctors that the number one skill for any healthcare professional, for me, is their ability to connect.
- [17:09]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [17:09]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And then secondly to that, communicate with the person in front of them. For me, that trumps knowledge any day of the week. And I've just seen that time and time again. And that sort of fits in with what you're saying, right, that if empathy, it's empathy if you feel as a human being, if you feel heard, if you feel listened.
- [17:28]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [17:30]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It does something A, you're more receptive to hearing what comes next. So I would say it's connection first, education second. Because when you've connected with them and they feel heard by you, they're open to listening to what you have to say. Whereas if you just go charging in and say, look, you need to lose weight, get to the gym a bit more. You know what? This is why a lot of people say, oh, patients don't do what we ask them to do. Well, I think the reason they don't do what we ask them to do as a profession is because a lot of the time we're not communicating it in a way that makes sense to them and actually deeply connects with them.
- [18:04]
David Hamilton
I know. And it's that deep connection has tremendous physical effects. In fact, one of the side effects, I suppose, of that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the Mother Teresa effect. I think it was a study. I think it was at Yale or one of the other big American universities. They got over 100 people to watch a video of a 50 minute video of mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta demonstrating care and compassion to homeless people. And at the end of the study, their levels of a little immune antibody in the saliva called Siga went up by about 50% for no reason other than just watching the video. And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards. And that's because for the hour or two afterwards they were still talking about, remember that part when Mother Teresa, she sat down beside that really elderly gent and they didn't say a word, she just sat beside him, she took his hand and laid her head against his shoulder just so that he wouldn't feel alone at that time. And just that emotional bonding experience of watching them on that video spiked the immune system. It just lifted that little antibody level.
- [19:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So it's not just the person who received that, it's also, if you're watching that.
- [19:27]
David Hamilton
Absolutely. It's watching it as well. Because it comes down to how it makes you feel. If you can feel a sense of connection from being the person who in this case is delivering kindness or compassion, being on the receiving end or watching someone else, whether it's live or even on a video, it has more or less the same effect.
- [19:44]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I guess that could be why if you watch a really good film that really moves you and connects you and you feel like crying or you feel like you've really connected with it, I don't know, that's been studied, but I wouldn't be.
- [19:58]
David Hamilton
There was a clip of Oprah Winfrey during the time of the Oprah show. And she was, I forget the exact nature of the clip, but she was really changing people's lives. And it was something to do with a school teacher in a class and people watching it were moved to tears and felt so uplifted. And it produced high levels of what I call the kindness hormone oxytocin. It's also called the bonding hormone, the hugging, the cuddle chemical. But it produced high levels of that simply by feeling and moved and inspired by watching like a five minute clip from what used to be the Oprah Winfrey Show.
- [20:35]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I mean, it's really incredible. And this is right up my street. Honestly.
- [20:40]
This is becoming clearer and clearer to me as every year passes since I qualified for medical school. And I gain more experience and more experience, I see more patients. This for me is the missing link in healthcare that not everything can be quantified with just blood results and test results and just oh, do this, do that. There's just something deeper. And that is something that, for me is what it means to be a human being. Because whether we're a patient or we're not a patient, we're all humans. And there are some fundamental truths for humans. We're social beings. We like to be connected with others. What you said about secretory or S I G A is so interesting to me. I've also studied immunology, and for people wondering what SRGA is, we all know about the immune system, which helps fight off infections and viruses and bacteria and all kinds of things. And a lot of your immune system, maybe 70% or so of the immune system activity, is in and around your gut, which is super interesting. And that's called your mucosal immune system. And the primary, the main sort of defense molecule off that is srga, secretory iga. So to think that that can go up with this kind of compassion.
- [22:00]
David Hamilton
Compassion being practiced.
- [22:01]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, it's incredible. There are studies, aren't there, about recovering quicker from colds, I think, and the flu. What to do with compassion.
- [22:10]
David Hamilton
Yeah, I think that there's some research looking at the more compassion the. That, let's say, a doctor feels, as part of this relational empathy study, that the people who had scored the doctor the highest, in other words, the interpretation of that is they felt listened to and they felt connected and more warm and connected with the doctor. Their recovery rate was about 50% faster than everyone else. It really just came down to how much empathy, how much of a connection was initiated by the doctor. I mean, that's incredible. Isn't that amazing? They recovered 50% faster compared to people when there wasn't enough contact and connection during the consultation.
- [22:55]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. I find the idea that it's not just.
- [22:59]
The giver, but the receiver or the watcher, also gets a biochemical change. And I don't know if you're familiar with someone called Professor Francis McGlone. I interviewed him on the podcast about a year ago. He helped me actually write the chapter on touch in my second book, the Stress Solution. He's one of the world's leading researchers in touch, basically, and he's done some incredible. You should check it out, actually, because it's completely aligned with a lot of the work that you do. And he talks about these two different kinds of touch nerve fibers. You've got one which is the fast one, which simply tells you where you've been touched. I touch you on your forearm, you know, oh, wrong has just touched me on my forearm. But. But if you stroke someone on the forearm, it does something completely different.
- [23:43]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [23:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Well, his work has shown that it's a different kind of nerve fiber. It's called the CT afferent. That goes up to a different part of the brain, the emotional brain. And when you get that stroked, oxytocin levels go up, blood pressure goes down, heart rate goes down. Natural killer cells, which are part of your immune system, go up.
- [24:05]
David Hamilton
Amazing.
- [24:05]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
50 to 70%. So we're seeing a similarity, but also that those C tactile afferent nerve fibers, so that slower nerve fiber that tells, that gives you that nice, warm, cuddly feeling. Most of them are on your upper back and your shoulder.
- [24:24]
David Hamilton
Is that right?
- [24:25]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. So what's fascinating about that is that why would evolution put something like that on a very hard to access place? Well, his view and my view is that, well, it must have been there to promote that sort of social connection, so you would have to be with someone to stroke you there. And so the touch giver gets just as many benefits as the touch receiver. People who've got a pet. Stroking your pet makes you feel good, but it also makes your pet feel good. But this is not just in your head. Oh, it feels good right as you're showing. And as Francis McGlone has shown, it changes things biochemically. And for me, it's fascinating. It's the same hormone, oxytocin. So, you know, I mean, what do you make of that?
- [25:18]
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- [27:40]
David Hamilton
See, actually you mentioned the animal thing. I love animals. I lost my dog a few years ago. He had bone cancer. He was only two years old as well. And so I started looking at the links between bonding with animals and oxytocin. And one of my favorite statistics that I got out of that research is the chances of a second heart attack within 12 months. And someone who's had one already if they have a dog is 400% less. And it's not just through the exercise, it's through a lot of it. Some of it is through the oxytocin generated through the bonding. Front page of Science, one of the top ranked science journals in the world. Front page about 10 years ago. Picture of a yellow Labrador. And in the study they compared people with a good relationship with dogs versus people with a not so good relationship. The way they quantified it is they videoed them and they watched them interacting with the dogs. And if someone made frequent eye contact and sustained the eye contact for a few seconds, they were called long gazers. So they were defined as good relationships. If they made eye contact less frequently and not quite as long, then they were called short gazers. So not as good relationships. So after 30 minutes of interacting, amazingly, oxytocin levels had increased by about 350% in the human and nearly doubled in the dog for doing nothing other than warm, playful interactions, rubbing the tummy, just warm interaction. You get the same thing with humans. But the reason I mentioned it is because you mentioned dogs there and I love animals and amazingly, and that I believe is one of the main reasons the main contributors outside of exercise, to the cardiovascular benefits, because oxytocin has tremendous cardiovascular benefits.
- [29:25]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Well, let's expand on that because.
- [29:28]
That is a novel concept for people. That the sort of things you're talking about, human touch, connection, stroking, you know, all these kind of, I guess what we would call the softer components of health. You're saying alongside Physical exercise, physical activity is the most important thing for your cardiovascular health. I don't think many people would be familiar with that as an idea.
- [29:54]
David Hamilton
Just warmth and connection because they produce oxytocin. So you can create that sense through generosity and kindness, compassion, empathy. Anything that generates that sense of warmth and connection, we know produces oxytocin. But what's interesting is all the research showing the physiological effects of, I call it the kindness hormone, really, to distinguish between stress hormones. Because physiologically, in many ways, kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel. I mean, if you ask anyone what's the opposite of stress, most people say, oh, it's peace or it's calm. But that's not technically the opposite of stress. That's the absence of stress. Physiologically speaking. If you look at the physical effects of stress and you look at the physical effects of the feeling that you get through kindness, which is warmth and connection, then they're physiologically opposite. Even psychologically, there's some studies showing that emotionally we get the opposite effects because many of them, the physical effects of stress are not because of a situation, but because of how you feel when you're in that situation. Because two people could be stuck in traffic and one person's feeling stressed and they're producing adrenaline and cortisol, the other person's feeling relaxed, they're not producing much at all. So it's not necessarily the traffic, it's how you feel. So the feelings of stress generate stress hormones. But when you be kind and those feelings you get of warmth and connection, they generate oxytocin. I call this them, I call it a kindness hormone. To make that distinction, that it's a physical. It's a hormone that gets produced because of how you're feeling in that moment, which you initiate through empathy, compassion, touch, emotional warmth, any of these soft behaviors. And understanding this explains a large body of research that we knew the trend in the past, but we didn't know why it worked that way. For example, why people with better quality relationships have better cardiovascular systems, why things like hostility and aggression is correlated with higher levels of hardening of the arteries. We didn't know why that is. But now the evidence seems to suggest that aggression and hostility, for example, reduce levels of the kindness hormone oxytocin. And therefore we take away a vital part of cardio protection. Because oxytocin is now called a cardio protective hormone, meaning it protects the cardiovascular system. One of the ways it does it is to reduce blood pressure. So I love explaining it in that sense that it's physically the opposite of stress because of how it makes you feel. So you can feel that way through being the giver, being the receiver, or being the person who's watching a nice moment taking place.
- [32:29]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, David, my mind is blown.
- [32:34]
Yeah. This is so fascinating. So fascinating. And I'm drawing all kinds of connections in my head over things that I've been talking about for years, things I've noticed with patients, and this is filling in a few more gaps, and it's all starting to knit together.
- [32:49]
You may have seen the study, I think it was published three or four years ago, which suggested that the feeling of being lonely is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
- [33:00]
David Hamilton
Incredible.
- [33:00]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It's incredible. But then when you try and make the case that oxytocin might be the cardio protective hormone, then suddenly it's all starting to make sense. But I guess we have to. We have to look at things on an evolutionary or through an evolutionary lens really to try and figure this out. Right. Like I said, why would evolution put these touch receptors on our back? Well, to promote social contact.
- [33:23]
David Hamilton
You would think it's nature rewarding you saying, yes, more of this, please. I will make you healthy. Keep doing that.
- [33:29]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah.
- [33:30]
David Hamilton
In fact, you know the gene for oxytocin, the oxytocin receptor gene, actually, it's one of the oldest in the human genome. It's about 500 million years old and four days. No, I'm not. Four days. Yeah, it's about 500. Crap. Joke. Apologies to the listeners. I couldn't resist it. But 500 million years old, what that tells you is it's vital for the survival of all species. I mean, all warm blooded species have an oxytocin or a oxytocin similar system. In humans, it's integrated itself during those hundreds of millions of years into almost all important meaningful systems in the body. Even the growth of heart muscle cells in children. If children are loved and cared for, then as well as that producing human growth hormone, it also produces oxytocin, which helps to facilitate the growth of heart muscle cells, neurons, kidney cells, liver cells, skin cells. And that's why children who are deprived of love and affection, they end up, I guess psychologists call it psychosocial dwarfism. They end up a lot smaller than their genetic potential because levels of growth hormone and oxytocin are suppressed through the lack of love and compassion and care.
- [34:41]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Absolutely. And then there's the study with the Romanian orphanages where kids were fed and watered but they didn't get touch and the ones who didn't get any touch have got higher incidence as they're older. Autoimmune problems, behavioral problems. And it all marries up that we're a social species. We are.
- [35:01]
We've evolved to be connected to each other, but now we're frankly more connected to our devices.
- [35:07]
David Hamilton
I know.
- [35:08]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Than we are to other humans. So if you show your smartphone compassion and you touch your smartphone, does it also release oxytocin?
- [35:17]
David Hamilton
Well, you know, you've made me think there.
- [35:19]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I was joking, but unless you're gonna pull out a research study.
- [35:22]
David Hamilton
No, I wasn't. I was gonna pull out the film Castaway with Tom Hanks.
- [35:25]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Okay.
- [35:26]
David Hamilton
And, you know, remember, was it Wilson? He called that. Was it a coconut or a football? He called it Wilson.
- [35:32]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I have not seen it, actually.
- [35:33]
David Hamilton
Years ago, Castaway.
- [35:34]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
But Gareth is videoing this in the background, nodding his head curiously.
- [35:38]
David Hamilton
So Tom Hanks, Castaway, he was on a desert island for years, and he made a connection. I'm sure it was an old burst football or a coconut or something, but he made it into something that he bonded with, and he spoke to it as if it was a person. He gave it a face and hair, and he called it Wilson. And he cared so much for it that one day when it got swept to sea, he was devastated. It was grief, it was loss. And I think if you can bond even with, you know, make a joke of it hugging a tree, it doesn't matter if you can bond with. Even in that case, an inanimate object doesn't matter as long as you feel I'm making light. Obviously, you're not gonna bond with a smartphone, but in general, if you can, like a child bonding with a doll, for example, with a teddy bear, something that you feel you can bond with, it's that bonding itself that releases the oxygen. So we're wired to bond and to connect.
- [36:30]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I love that. And the idea of a child with their teddy or even this film, inanimate object and. Yeah, what started out as a slight joke, actually, if you think about it. Well, technically, you probably could bond with your smartphone if you gave it that kind of deep love, care and affection, but I guess we're not doing that, are we? That's the point.
- [36:55]
David Hamilton
The idea of even saying that. Most people laugh at that because we use our smartphones, but let's say you were to paint a wee smiley face on it, and maybe something happened to you that the only thing you had was a smartphone and you just made a connect. Maybe that was your way of communicating. With the world and you were all alone, all of a sudden you would have a connection with the smartphone. That's different from just sitting on the tube and looking at your emails, I.
- [37:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Guess in some ways. Well, in many ways.
- [37:28]
Yes. We're talking about connection, but we're talking also about.
- [37:34]
Intentional living and we're talking about being present and being mindful. Because that's really what that connection is, isn't it? If you're sort of building up that relationship with another person or another object or a teddy, you're intentionally doing it, maybe speaking to it before you go to bed. And as you said before, it's about the feeling that changes inside you that actually leads to a lot of those biochemical changes.
- [38:02]
David Hamilton
Absolutely, yeah. So.
- [38:05]
I often suggest to people that make kindness a practice, practice thinking kind thoughts about people. If you find yourself about to say something about someone, stop for a minute and even just make an attempt. Not gonna do it all the time, but some of the times make an attempt to think. I wonder if that person's struggling in their life right now. I know I'm talking about their behavior yesterday, but I wonder, I wonder if they're struggling right now. You never know. I wonder if that man or woman is a good parent. I wonder what their relationship was with their parents. And just change the dialogue. And what that does, it introduces empathy and introduces a different way of thinking. And not always successful, but oftentimes it will make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person. I think if we develop little practices, then kindness becomes a habit. So that it's the go to. It's the first thought, is the compassionate thought, the kind thought. And then the way in which you speak to people, the way in which you interact with people becomes more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit. And that, I think, becomes your way. And I'm speaking from experience here because I have completely changed as a person during the time that I've been really working on the mind, body connection, but particularly when I've been focused on kindness. I wasn't.
- [39:28]
I wasn't meaning as a horrible person, but relative, I have made large gains.
- [39:35]
I guess, the quality of person that I've become. And I've become gentler, more compassionate, more kind. I cry a lot more. I don't know if that's related to it, but I'm much softer than I was maybe 10 years ago. And it's a consequence of my awareness of what kindness and compassion is and what it does for us.
- [39:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, you can cultivate this as a Feeling as a practice. And I think for many of us, we sort of feel that I'm just not a kind person or, you know, that's not me. And it almost feels a little bit forced. But I think you can force it a little bit and actually make it and turn it into your reality. And it's something, you know, it's something that I talk about on my kids loads is this idea of being kind. And we play this gratitude game every dinner time that I've mentioned on this podcast before, so I don't need to mention the exact nature of that game again. But sometimes we do add on a question to say, well, what have I done today? What kind thing have I done today? And we go around and we have to think about it. And we once did that for about three weeks every day.
- [40:46]
David Hamilton
Wow.
- [40:47]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And I think initially it was a bit tricky. Oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. There was a bit of resistance to it. But after a while it really started to embed in. And I think the kids were super excited to tell mommy and daddy at dinner time what kind thing they did today. And so it almost. I guess in some ways it's sort of playing back to what you were saying at the start, which we're going to explore is the power of our mind on our bodies. Like, you can almost practice the kind of person you want to become and you can become it.
- [41:20]
David Hamilton
Absolutely. I mean, it's like no one's ever become an Olympic champion by going to the gym once or running around the block once. It's a practice. So anything that you do to get better at is something that you practice. So I think when you practice being kind, that's amazing game that you play with the kids. Have you actually. Have you noticed that as you do that you play that game, that they've become more likely to be kind because they're looking for something to talk about 100%.
- [41:48]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. It's amazing, and it's very hard. It's not a scientific study where I can peel out every little component in it, but something has changed. And again, for me, I'd like to think I was a kind and compassionate person anyway. But I think being aware of this and actually possibly trying to cultivate that in my children is also upskilling me in that area as well. And I notice that a lot in my interactions now on social media.
- [42:17]
And that even when someone, which is very rare these days, but if someone's left a snotty comment or says something to attack me.
- [42:27]
It doesn't really bother me anymore. And I look at it with kindness and compassion. Oh, I wonder what's going on in your day. You're probably taking that out on me in my head. And I would really.
- [42:37]
There's a scientific argument to it, but even if there wasn't, it just feels like the right thing to do.
- [42:44]
David Hamilton
It does, yeah.
- [42:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And it feels nicer and you sleep better and you don't get agitated as much.
- [42:49]
David Hamilton
Exactly.
- [42:50]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I think that whole idea that the kindness is the opposite of stress, it's a really beautiful concept.
- [42:58]
What happens when we get angry? Like, I know from a stress perspective in terms of the stress hormones, and I have seen anger that we hold on to for years, and resentment, it is toxic. It can absolutely raise your blood pressure. And I've got a few patients of mine who I couldn't get their blood pressure down with medication, with diets, with lifestyle changes in a way that I would always. I would always go for nutrition and lifestyle first until they started to let go of anger that they were holding onto. Is that something you're familiar with?
- [43:32]
David Hamilton
Yeah, I mean, I think it's better to get out than in. I mean, sometimes people say you shouldn't be angry, but you need to get it out. There's gotta be some way of venting, you know, I'm not advocating being unkind to people. What I mean is, if you've got pent up and stored up anger, it's better out than. In fact, I read a book recently called Expressive Writing by a professor called James Pennebaker, and he pioneered a lot of the work on releasing anger and trauma in the body by simply spending 15 or 20 minutes a day writing continuously for that time on four consecutive days about your emotional trauma or something that happened. And you basically outline what happened, how you felt, how it's affected your life kind of thing, just some way. That's a basic structure to vent. And sometimes you can swear and you could anger, but the idea, the act of expressing it gradually has an amazing effect because in one of the studies they found that their immune response to an endotoxin was significantly higher than those who hadn't done the expressive right. And so the immune system is becoming more robust as a consequence of expressive right.
- [44:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
That's incredible. And for people listening who are not familiar with what an endotoxin is.
- [44:52]
One way of describing it is that inside your gut we've got lots of different bacteria, trillions of bacteria and other organisms. And we very simplistically.
- [45:05]
Consider them to be good and bad, which is far too Simplistic, but essentially some of them, those bacteria are called what we call gram negative. And on their coat you've got something called lipopolysaccharide or lps. It's a lot of sugar that basically is fine if it stays in your gut, but if it sort of goes through from the gut into your bloodstream, that's where it can be pro inflammatory. And that's cause all kinds of problems in your brain and your joints with your blood sugar. So that's what an endotoxin is. And what you're saying there about how it can alter your immune response is pretty incredible.
- [45:42]
David Hamilton
So just by doing expressive writing, they found a lot of other studies. They even tracked students over the course of a year and they had enough students to get a statistically significant result and tracked the number of visits to the medical center. And they found that those who did the expressive writing had significantly lower needed to visit the medical center. Having just got anger and hurt and trauma out of their system a little.
- [46:07]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
You'Ve got to process it in some way. And actually this whole British characteristic of stiff upper lip, keep it inside. I think it is incredibly problematic because that anger, that energy really has to go somewhere. And we're seeing loads of good evidence that it gets stored in your body and it can impact muscle tightness and all kinds of things that people are to trying, trying to stretch out. But actually often it's unprocessed emotions that I've seen in my own life. I've seen my own flexibility improve dramatically, not by stretching every day, but by releasing some emotions that I'd held onto, which is simply incredible.
- [46:47]
David Hamilton
And you know, cause if we don't, then it's possible to start fitting the cardiovascular stats. I mean, one of the. I guess one of my favorite titles of a study is called Marital Conflict Relations and Coronary Artery Calcification, or CAC for short. And I think most people can work it with that means marital conflict relations and coronary artery calcification. Scientists took 150 married couples, put them in a room one couple at a time, asked them to discuss marital topics for half an hour, and they videotaped them and they scored displays language and displays of kindness and compassion and gentleness and patience. And they also scored anger and hostility and aggression and all these kind of things like that. So you've got a whole spectrum from the real far out hostile, aggressive and.
- [47:40]
Frequent expressions of anger to the other side, which is really people you say were softer people, gentler, much more compassion and kindness and empathy and touch. Also so in one of the most amazing symmetries I've ever come across in science, when I say asymmetry, you know, it's symmetrical, one thing on the other. The group who had high levels of hostility, aggression, and anger expressing, which you might say are hardened people, they had high levels of hardening of the arteries. And the group who were softer people, they had normal, what you would call soft arteries. When you controlled in the study for diet and exercise, smoking, drinking, et cetera, the only difference, really was how you behaved in that half an hour. And that was taken as a proxy for normal behavior. That half an hour slice was taken as a proxy for. This is probably how you are a large part of the time. And so what you can see there is if we don't get out our system, it can end up having serious negative consequences.
- [48:38]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. And I think we all need to find ways to process.
- [48:44]
Those feelings that wind us up. Anger, frustration, too much struggle. Exercise can be a great way of burning it off and letting it go. Even I say to people, if you don't have time, do one minute of star jumps as hard as you can. You literally are burning off and that stress to a certain degree. Another tip that a friend of mine gave me, he uses it himself, and I have tried it a couple of times. It's like, if someone makes you mad or you get frustrated with something, write an email back to them, but don't press send. And I can't tell you, it is incredibly beneficial because as you've already demonstrated with some of the research you've cited, there's something about the act of not just keeping it going round your mind, going around your body, you are processing it in some way. You're writing it out, you're talking it out, and that is processing. And. And we shouldn't underestimate.
- [49:46]
How valuable simple tools like this really are.
- [49:49]
David Hamilton
I know because one of the things I've noticed is we think of a feeling or an emotion as just something in our minds, but there's actually four components to it. You can't really disentangle an emotion or a feeling from your brain chemistry and body chemistry. You also can't disentangle it from your autonomic nervous system, nor can you disentangle a feeling from your muscles. I mean, you don't smile when you're happy because you remember to smile. It's a reflex reaction because the zygomaticus major muscle that pulls your lips into a smile is connected in some way to the, say, call them the happy centers of the brain. Similarly, when you feel stressed, you don't remember to tense your jaw and tense your neck. It's a reflex reaction. So what happens is how we feel gets expressed on the muscles, but it goes the other way as well, what you do with your body. One of the best ways I've ever found to reduce momentary feelings of stress is to move my body, get up. Rather than sitting down and breathing softly, I'll get up and move, but an artificially slow pace. And using this fact that emotion isn't just a feeling, it's connected to your, it's part of how it shows up in your muscles. If you move your body in an artificially slow way and even talk artificially slowly, obviously if you're at a meeting, you're not gonna do that. But on your own, it's almost like your brain hears, I've got this, I must feel quite relaxed. And I think that works because long before language, language is what, 15,000 years old, give or take a wee bit, but long before language, our ancestors communicated through body language and gesture. If they want to express themselves, they use their body to express. So what happened is that became this really strong relationship between physical expression and how the person feels. So it's really so in that way, what you find is how you feel shows up in your muscles, but how you move your muscles and your body shows up in how you feel. And it's a two way street. So you can use your body, like exercise, movement, for example, to help change how you feel in the moment kind of thing.
- [51:50]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I spoke to a lot of therapists recently who work on people's bodies, whether it's a sports, massage therapist.
- [52:00]
Whatever kind of therapist, but they will tell you.
- [52:05]
That you can feel or they can feel, particularly when they've been doing it for a period of years. I said I can tell what's going on in that person's life. I can feel how stressed they are from the tone of their muscles and how their body feels. Now look, that's not my skill set, so I can't either. But it's really interesting to hear that.
- [52:24]
And I guess, David, as you're telling me.
- [52:27]
These stories and this research, I keep thinking back to you. As you said 20 years ago in the pharmaceutical industry and.
- [52:38]
These things that we're talking about, we often say are the softer characteristics of being a human, the softer sides to medicine or whatever.
- [52:48]
In some ways we're being a little bit derogatory about them, like almost as if we feel a need to soften it, like quite literally. Whereas it's not quite as.
- [53:03]
Robust as what's the oxygen level of the blood as it pumps out of the heart?
- [53:10]
Or is it because. Is it just a perception? Because you're a scientist by training, you're a scientist by degree. You've got a PhD in organic chemistry. This is pretty hardcore. Yet you are now talking with confidence, with knowledge about the science of kindness, of compassion, of touch, of visualization. You know, what do your former colleagues think of what you're doing now? Do they know? Are you still in touch with them?
- [53:45]
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- [56:07]
David Hamilton
I'm in touch with a couple of them who are actually greatly supportive, you know, because I find even when I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, it wasn't that people were so skeptical about things, they just didn't Know, most of the stuff I talk about, they just didn't know. And it's not like, I think we often have this perception. If someone is educated in a particular way, then they must know everything about everything. And, and many people are specialized in their own particular field. And I learned when I was there that nobody had any idea about the placebo effect, despite the fact we see it in the data, the drug trial data, every day, but no one actually knew anything about it. So the colleagues I'm still in touch with, I think some of them probably think it's a bit woo woo. But most of them that I've been in touch with over the years are greatly supportive. In fact, they're so fascinated by it. Isn't this amazing? I had no idea, for example, that, you know, if you, like you mentioned visualization, that if you visualize moving your body, then in some ways your brain processes that as if you're actually doing it. I remember telling one of my former colleagues that. What?
- [57:15]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Really?
- [57:15]
David Hamilton
So I got the brain scans and showed him. He's like, whoa, amazing. And it's not that, you know, I think skepticism is sometimes a product of just not knowing. It just doesn't sound possible. It's not that, you know, it just doesn't sound. Because you've never heard anything like that.
- [57:30]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It's not within your frame of reference. It's not the education model which you've been taught. It never came into that.
- [57:36]
David Hamilton
Exactly.
- [57:36]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So therefore there probably is a natural skepticism. But as you say, the way to change that is to give them the science in a way that they already understand it and go, hey, look, did you know that? And I agree, most people would be like, oh, that is so interesting. There's a lot of research on that, isn't there? About. Well, yes, how influential our minds are over our bodies. But I think I've written one of your blog posts on your website about.
- [58:03]
I think it's a research paper about if you imagined flexing your finger for 15 minutes a day for what, three months?
- [58:14]
David Hamilton
Was it three months? Yeah, yeah.
- [58:16]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
What happened?
- [58:17]
David Hamilton
Yeah, so what happened? Just to go back a step.
- [58:20]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, back up, sure.
- [58:21]
David Hamilton
So a professor at Harvard, very famous neurologist called Alvaro Pascal Leon, did a study where he got volunteers to play a sequence of five notes in a piano. So they basically put the hands flat on a table and went plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. With each with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, up and down a scale for two hours on Five consecutive days. Now it's not fully two hours. That's tiring. You might do like a minute of plunk, plunk, plunk, then a couple of minutes rest. A minute, A couple of minutes rest. But for two hours, they had their brain scanned every day when the region connected to the finger muscles and it underwent significant change. We now call that neuroplasticity. So it massively changed inside by about 30 to 40 times. That's fair enough. It's what you now expect from repetition of movement. But while they were doing that, a separate group of people put their hands flat on the table, closed their eyes and imagined that they were playing the five notes. No movement. It's called kinesthetic imagery. And what that means is you imagine how it feels as if you were really doing it. You're not necessarily seeing it. You could see it if you want, but the key is to imagine the feelings as if you really are, are moving your finger muscles, but you're not. They had their brain scanned every day and their same region of their brain had also changed by 30 to 40 times. And if you put the brain scan side by side, you cannot tell the difference between those who played the notes with their fingers, those who played the notes in the mind. So that's given birth to a lot of research, including the little finger research that was. I think that was done at the Cleveland Institute in the States. And what they did got volunteers to do 15 extensions and contractions. You know, scientists have to really nail it, tell you exactly. It's like extend a little finger, finger 15 times and contract it, extend it, contract it 15 times 20 seconds, rest 15 times 20 seconds, rest 15times 20 seconds, rest like 15 reps at a time for quarter of an hour for three months. And they got 53% stronger. While they were doing that, a separate group of people closed their eyes, hands flat on the table. Kinesthetic imagery. They imagined they were doing the 15 extensions and contractions, but no movement at the all. They got 35% stronger because this was at the start and end of the study. They put their finger in a machine and lifted a wee set of weights up to see how strong they were. So by just imagining that you'd moved your finger, they'd got 35% stronger versus 53. Now someone's skeptical. When I first talked about, they said it wasn't 53% like those moving the finger, but it also wasn't zero. Here is 35% improvement in strength from doing nothing at all other than imagining the feelings, as if you really went moving your fingers.
- [61:00]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah.
- [61:02]
It's just incredible. And then it makes me think of.
- [61:07]
The untapped potential we all have within us, that.
- [61:14]
We'Re looking at a particular component of health, let's say. One thing I try and do on this podcast is to broaden out that conversation around how to say there are so many different factors that play a role. But what you're saying, David, really is really going to be very profound for a lot of people that our minds, how we visualize things, they can absolutely play a difference in our body.
- [61:39]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [61:39]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And it's incredible, the idea that visualization works, because I wasn't familiar with some of that research.
- [61:49]
But I've always done it myself. I've always talked about it with my patients, and I've always said, look, if the top athletes in the world visualize so that they can have peak performance in their chosen activity or their race, well, you kind of want peak performance in your own life. Absolutely right. Whatever that means to you. So why would you not use that tool? Oh, it's good enough for Tiger woods and Michael Phelps, but it's not good enough for me. It doesn't really make any sense, does it? I know that many pro golfers visualize.
- [62:27]
The night before they play. They literally are visualizing being on the tee, the exact shot shape they want their ball to make, what their club they're going to play next. They're going to visualize it all the way until it goes in. I remember reading stuff like this a while ago, and when I did get into golf a few years back, I would often do that on a Friday night before my record. I would actually visualize. And you know what? It makes a difference. And I think this then plays into this whole idea that can the brain tell the difference between vivid imagery and reality?
- [63:01]
David Hamilton
And it doesn't seem to. In fact, there's a number of related studies in almost different fields that tell you that. I mean, for example, it's more obvious if you think of stress. Your brain doesn't really know the difference between whether you're in a stressful situation or whether you're thinking about it, anticipating it, remembering it. Similarly, your brain produces, you still produce the kindness hormone oxytocin. Whether you're being kind watching it or even closing your eyes and thinking about it and feeling the same feelings. You don't have to be there with movement. In fact, all the top sports people even. There's even studies on rehabilitation from stroke, and there's even been a meta analysis recently. Gold standard statistical Analysis that looked at all the studies of stroke and they found typically people who've had a stroke would do six weeks of physiotherapy sessions. But in these studies, and it wasn't people who just had a stroke, one study, one of the patients 14 years ago, and everyone does physiotherapy, but half of them, in addition to the physiotherapy, at the end of their session, they do 30 minutes or so of visualization where they have to visualize repetitively movements that they are familiar with. So imagine reaching for a glass of water, taking a drink, putting it back down. Imagine reaching, drinking repetitively. And in all of the studies, those who do visualization on top of physiotherapy recover much faster and much more in that six week period than those who just do physiotherapy alone. So there's a number of different ways the brain isn't distinguished and even eating. There's a study by a professor called Carey Morwedge found that looking at the way that the brain suppresses appetite, I think it's leptin it produces, isn't it that brain suppresses appetite when you've eaten a certain amount? And they found that if a person was just imagining eating, so they got people to imagine eating lots of sweets or lots of cubes of cheese versus just a little amount of sweets or a little amount of cubes of cheese. And they found that the more the person imagined eating, the more it activated the I'm full part of the brain and their appetite was suppressed. And in the paper they reported that the difference between real and imaginary, even when it comes to eating, seems to be a bit kind of bloody.
- [65:15]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So that could almost be a strategy for people who struggle with food cravings, I'm guessing. But you know, certainly it's worth trying. Like what happens if you've got a craving for that chocolate and you think about it and you imagine it on your tongue and that you're eating it and you imagine it sort of going down your esophagus into your tummy and that warm feeling. Look, I've not tried that with patients as a strategy, but why not? And what's the downside? Right?
- [65:45]
David Hamilton
I'm wondering. Cause I've thought of this, I've thought quite a lot about this and I'm wondering, because the body responds to vivid imagery and I don't know the answer to this, but I wonder if imagining eating chocolate will affect blood sugar. I don't know. I really don't know.
- [66:00]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Wouldn't that be fascinating?
- [66:01]
David Hamilton
It would be fascinating to test it. It might be better. Not so much for food cravings, but for losing weight. Imagine eating your dinner before you eat it and then imagine eating something healthy and at least maybe produce something healthy, but at least it'll suppress your appetite. So you might find yourself eating less. I don't know the answer, but I've thought about it a little bit.
- [66:21]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It really is super, super interesting. You know, you mentioned at the start that you came down from Dunblane and you sort of gave a little hint there that you took up tennis. Cause everyone around you is playing tennis. And so you've taken up in your 40s and you thought you weren't very good, but now you're playing through the leagues and you mentioned visualization. And then I clocked that. I thought, okay, well, what's going on there? So, Dave, tell us how you're going to be playing at Wimbledon next year.
- [66:46]
David Hamilton
Yeah, well, I might go the year after, but here's the thing.
- [66:52]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And take us back to when you started and what happened when you started. Just take us through that journey.
- [66:56]
David Hamilton
So I started playing tennis in Dunblane. Most people in the leagues have been playing since their children at the very latest, since they're teenagers. Very unusual for someone to start playing for the first time in their mid-40s. So I started to really enjoy it because I realized it was quite scientific. The coach would every Wednesday night there's coach and the coach would say, this is how you hold the racket. And if you turn it at an angle and lift the racket from low and move it to high, you put topspin in the ball and it keeps it in the court. And I thought, this is quite scientific. So I thought, this is great fun. I was very resistant to playing tennis, but thought, I'm going to do this. So I joined the league systems and for two years I was officially the second worst tennis player in Dunblade. Officially. And I say second worst. There's like three or four league seasons per year. They last a couple of months. I think it's four a year. We do in the last couple of months. And at the bottom there's usually me. Second bottom for two years. So it was like eight box league seasons right at the bottom. Second bottom. And the only reason I wasn't bottom is because you get a point for showing up. So it's not like football in the premiership where you get three points for a win, one point for a draw, nothing for a loss. Indunblane box leagues to encourage you to play, you get one point for showing up, four points for win, et cetera. So I always got six points for playing six matches because it's four leagues of seven players anyway. So for two years, my average losing margin was six love six one. I hadn't won a single set of tennis in two years in the box leagues. And I was getting a bit demoralized. And I thought, you know, I've helped to coach people, athletes, golfers. I've, you know, from time to time explained how visualization works, how you would apply it to your, your life, etc. I thought, why don't I try this? So it was exactly four weeks to the next box league season, and I thought, I'm going to science this up. I'm going to do it. So I decided I would pick the serve, and I picked one of the most difficult serves, you know, in all of sports, the tennis serve as the second most complex move in all of sports. Most people think, surely not the number one is the pole vault. The reason why it's so complex is because most people think you just hit the ball with a flat racket. But in actual fact, a pro will turn the racket side on and, and face the opposite way and rotate their body and sweep the racket at an angle over or up through the ball, depending on what kind of serve they want. And there's a serve called the kick serve that's very, very difficult. And I thought, I'm going to visualize. So I decided I'd visualize 10 serves to one side and 10 serves to the other side every day within two days of visualization couldn't do it. It was so difficult. And the reason why is because you need to have what's called a mental representation. You need to know what you're imagining. It's okay. When I talked about the study with str, they were using imagining things that they were familiar with, like reaching for a glass of water. In fact, you've never done a tennis serve. You can't visualize it correctly. So I used a little trick of neuroscience called action observation. In many ways, not only can your brain not distinguish between whether you're doing something or imagining it, your brain can't really distinguish much between whether you're doing something, imagining, or watching someone else doing it, providing you watch repetitively. It's called action observation. Gets a lot of research now and sports science. So I obtained a video of Andy Murray doing serving. I cut it down to about five seconds, and I watched it 3,000 times. That's how we activate action observation. Not in one go. I printed out a little table in Microsoft Word. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, week one, week two, week three, week four. So I had roughly 30 days to do this. So I watched it 100 times a day for 30 days just on replay. And. And that's just conditioning the brain circuits as if you're visualizing. And then after a couple of days, my mental representation was absolutely crystal clear. I could see a professional kick serve, crystal clarity in my mind. So then after the second or third day, 10 visualizations of hitting the serve to one side, 10 to the other. Once a week, I went down to the court, hit a few balls. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I won the league. I literally went from having never won a set to winning the division. Then I won the next division without dropping a set. So then I was up to the second division and all that. So I went from the fourth to the third to the second. That's when you're getting into the really much tougher players who've been playing literally since childhood. And I'm not trying to impress anyone, but just to impress upon you that my improvement was in large part related to the volume of visualization. The fact that I'd used this visualization.
- [71:28]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Of a particular shot repetitively, I mean, just so incredible. Look, I'm trying to think about the listener who is thinking, okay, I don't want to be a sportsman. I have no interest in tennis. I don't know. But they might be, I don't know, nervous about public speaking. And they've got to present somewhere next week or in front of their colleagues. Yeah. So.
- [71:52]
Can we say that if they are scared of public speech speaking for a week leading up to the event, they can, every evening in bed or just, you know, sitting down in a quiet space, visualize walking onto that stage, what it feels like, who is in the audience, what the. I don't know what the smell will be. I don't know. Is this something that we can all use in our own lives for whatever we want to achieve?
- [72:20]
David Hamilton
Exactly. In fact, you hit the nail on the head there because. Because the way to do it, the way to apply this to, say, public speaking, if you have a fear of that, or even if there's someone you feel nervous around, for example, is you visualize from that moment, let's say you're getting up from the stage, your name's called, and what you're visualizing, you've got to pay attention to as you're imagining, pay attention to how your shoulders feel. Pay attention to your gait, how fast you're walking, pay attention to your facial muscles. And what you're actually doing is you've got to visualize the movement of your body, because that's what the brain wires in. The brain will wire that repetitive movement of the body as if you're really doing it. So you're not. Many people think if you want to visualize public speaking, just they go right to the end and see a standing ovation. But in actual fact, what I'm suggesting is you visualize your physical body the way you would move your body. If you feel, I've got this, I've got something, I can't wait to tell them, I'm feeling relaxed, I'm feeling confident. And so visualize the entire movement of your body, how you hold and move your body as you get to the stage. And then visualize the first opening two or three lines. So you're literally paying attention to your body. Similarly, if you're visualizing, let's say, someone who makes you feel nervous, maybe it's your boss at work or something, then normally what you would do is your body would tense up and your speech would be affected. So visualize moving up towards your boss, your supervisor, and visualize your body being relaxed, Your back, your spine being straight, your shoulders relaxed, your head up. Visualize your rate of breathing, paying attention to your physical organism, how you hold and move your body. And that's what the brain wires in as if you're really doing it. That for a week leading up to the presentation or the meeting with the boss, then you'll find your brain will have wired enough that that might go into default, it might go into an automatic or. Certainly it would be easier to be like that than had you not done the visualization.
- [74:12]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. I think for me, there's probably an added bonus there, which is.
- [74:17]
Apart from your brain now being there. And by the time you rock up to that event, your brain feels, I've been here before, I think it has another purpose, which, which is you are proactively doing something to prepare. You're not stressing and worrying and getting anxious. You're going, okay, cool, that's gonna be nerve wracking. But I can do something each day now that's gonna get me stronger for that event.
- [74:46]
David Hamilton
Yeah, it's an amazing feeling because I think many people in society do feel disempowered.
- [74:54]
We don't know what to do to improve ourselves. And I think just given that little bit, it gives you confidence it boosts your self esteem and you suddenly feel I'm in control or I am controlling more of this than I ever thought. I am this kind of person that can do that. And it does wonders for your identity, your self esteem and it's a happiness tool as well. But it gives you more energy, psychological energy. Just I can do this.
- [75:18]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, for sure.
- [75:19]
David Hamilton
I am this person.
- [75:20]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So David, you've written about the five side effects of kindness, right? Which I think is a lovely, lovely idea, particularly with someone with a background in the pharmaceutical industry.
- [75:32]
David Hamilton
I wanted to turn around side effect. Well, a side effect isn't just a negative side effect of a drug. It's anything that happens alongside the thing that you're intending to do.
- [75:42]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I guess anything we do in life has a consequence. Any drug you take has a consequence. They're all effects. I guess if it's the effect we want, we call it the therapeutic effect. If it's the effect we don't want, it's a side effect. I guess it's just how we phrase these things. But let's go into it. I think it's an interesting idea. So what are the five side effects of kindness?
- [76:05]
David Hamilton
So number one, kindness makes you happier. Number two, kindness is good for the heart. Number three, kindness slows aging. Number four, kindness improves relationships. And number five, kindness is contagious. There you go. Five side effects of kindness.
- [76:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I love that. And there's science behind all of that.
- [76:24]
David Hamilton
Absolutely behind all of it. In fact, the happiness stuff has been well studied. Typically, basically what you do is you compare people intentionally doing acts of kindness versus people in a control group who are just behaving as normal. And you can track the happiness levels before and after. And you can do it a number of different ways. But in almost all of those studies you see net gains in happiness. Or people who do more kindness generally tend to be typically happier. So what you see is kindness actually improves happiness. Another thing it does is it reduces stress. At the same time, the heart stuff is, is principally through the action of the kindness hormone, through being kind if it produces a sense of warmth and connection. What I did with that chapter is I just tracked the different physical effects in the heart and the cardiovascular system, even to do with inflammation and oxidative stress as you practice kindness because of how it makes you feel. The slowing aging stuff is interesting because there's a number of processes of aging, number of different ways that aging occurs. But one of the, one of them is something called oxidative stress or production of free radicals. One study I Cited when scientists were looking at the rate of oxidative stress in skin cells and they found that if you introduced the kindness hormone to the skin cells put under stress, the levels of oxidative stress were substantially less. And there's similar research looking at how the kindness hormone, I'll call it the kindness hormone. I love it, I love it. How it has quite a substantial body wide effect on oxidative stress, which is one of the processes of aging. It's just one of a number.
- [78:06]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I mean kindness reducing the aging process, that is profound. And I love the fact that you call it the kindness hormone oxytocin, which is also called the cuddle hormone or the cuddle chemical.
- [78:17]
David Hamilton
The hug drug.
- [78:18]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
The hug drug. But you know, in many ways it's all kind of pointing to, to the same conclusion, which is when we are around other people who support us and we support them when we're in our tribe, basically we feel good, our body changes, our genetic expression changes, we reduce things like inflammation and oxidative stress and immune dysfunction. These things which actually those three things probably drive most chronic diseases at their core. Inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction. And we're saying that simply being around people we love.
- [79:01]
Who are empathetic, who are kind, who are compassionate, it has profound impacts on all those things.
- [79:08]
David Hamilton
It's incredible. I mean it really is incredible. In fact, can I suggest another aging study? Recently scientists were tracking a Tibetan Buddhist practice called the loving kindness meditation.
- [79:18]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Oh yeah.
- [79:19]
David Hamilton
You basically say you think of people you care about in your life and other people, anyone in your life. And you say things like in your mind, may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace or something along. There's different versions but so may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace. And it's repetition of that for yourself, loved ones, even difficult people, all life. And it's a repetition. And it's been known for a while that that generates a system wide anti inflammatory effect. It impact part of the nervous system that controls something called the inflammatory reflex. Basically improves what's called vagal tone, which is like muscle tone but talking about a part of your nervous system that impacts on inflammation. And they found that practice caused a reduction in the inflammatory response to stress. But a recent study looked at the rate of biological aging by measuring the length of telomeres. You know, so telomeres you probably explained before the aglet, little plastic shoelace caps called aglets and the rate of loss of telomeres is proportional to the rate in which the person is aging at that time. And so they compared the control group with a group doing mindfulness meditation with a group doing may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace, or a version of the loving kindness meditation. And they measured the length of the loss of telomere after six weeks of normal. Just no practice at all. And that's your baseline. And then they measured mindfulness meditation. They found a little slowing of the loss, but they found no measurable loss at all in that six week period of those who did the loving kindness. They may be happy, maybe. And it seems to be that a possible explanation is an anti inflammatory effect in the vicinity of of the telomeres, which you might think of as a decluttering of the environment around the DNA which allows it to repair itself better.
- [81:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I mean, it is just incredible. And it puts a huge smile on my face hearing things like this because it's just a nice thing to hear. Right? It's great when the things that make us feel good as human beings also do good for us. Right. That's kind of win, win all rounds. You said that kindness is contagious.
- [81:45]
David Hamilton
Yeah.
- [81:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Can you explain?
- [81:46]
David Hamilton
Oh no. This is actually what this is. I was going to say this is my favorite, but I've got so many favorites I get carried away sometimes.
- [81:54]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
You sound like me. I'm the same. This is why this conversation could keep going on and on unless we start thinking about wrapping it at some point. But fire away.
- [82:02]
David Hamilton
So a study between Harvard and Yale, they did a clever little business game simulation. A lot of these studies are doing done in little simulations. You create a game and what you're secretly measuring is kindness or cooperative behavior. And what they found is if you be kind to someone, then because of how that person feels, they call it elevation. That person feels either connected to you or they feel uplifted or they feel grateful. It doesn't really matter. It's a feeling, a changed feeling. That person will likely be kind or kindness to someone else because of how you made them feel. Now that person now is at one social step from you or one degree of separation. But that person will be kind or kinder to someone else because of how they were made to feel. And that's at two degrees of separation. But then that person will be kind or kinder to someone else at three degrees of separation or three social stops. But that isn't real practice because in reality, given the average amount of interconnected connectedness interactions that we have in any one day. You might well probably say that if you be kind to someone, if you were to follow them around, which hopefully you don't do, but we don't do. But if you were to follow a person around with a camera, you would probably find that the person you've just helped will be kind or kinder to five people over the course of the rest of the day because of how you made them feel, given the average amount of interconnection. But those five people will be kind or kinder to five more. And now we're at two social steps, 25 people. But each of those five people will be kind or kinder to five further people, which is 125 at three social steps. So you really have this ripple effect. Just like you drop a pebble in a pond and the wave goes out in all directions, and a lily pad at the opposite side of the pond goes up and down. And it doesn't know why it's going up and down, but it's going up and down because it's the wave. But the same is happening to lily pads at the other side of the pond. The wave goes out in all directions. So what this research shows is that kindness spreads out in all directions. So it's not just one person that you help, but it ripples out in all directions. And if you were to track it that way, you would probably find somewhere, given the average amount of social interaction most people have, you probably find around about 125 people, probably more, given a densely populated age area, are benefiting from every single time you do even say something nice, you pay a compliment, you help someone, you hold a door for someone. It sounds so preposterous, so simple. But I put it to listeners that if you ever feel small, if you ever feel that you don't contribute, you don't make a difference. You're doing it every single day. Even with the little things that you don't think matter, but they matter to the person that you've helped, who will then spread. Spread it out to three social steps.
- [84:55]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, David, I absolutely love things like this.
- [85:00]
It makes me think of.
- [85:03]
In this time where many of us feel powerless to make a change and we don't like the way society is heading. It reminds me of that phrase, I don't know if it's Gandhi. I can't remember who it is. Be the change you want to see in the world. This is putting it right back in our own court, saying, hey, you know what? Be kind to someone each day. And that Will ripple out. That is something we can all do. And, you know, we say it's for that other person, even if it doesn't make us feel good, but the reality is it does make us feel good. You know, compare the difference when you go into a coffee shop and order your coffee and take it and go on with your day compared to when you actually take it. Say something nice to the person to the point Barista. Hey, thanks so much. I really appreciate that. Hey, you made me a great one yesterday. I hope this one's as good, you know. Anyway, have a good day, whatever it is. They've got a smile on their face. They have probably been sort of shocked out of the. Maybe the tedium that they were feeling, trying to make 100 coffees in an hour. But you feel good as well. And that does in your own life, spread to your other interactions. But it reminds me a bit of what's something Andy Ramage said to me. I had him on, I think, in November. He set up this thing, this company, one year. No beer. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a really fun podcast I had with him, actually. Great conversation. And he was citing some of the research. I think it's from Nicholas Kristakis that I'm familiar with about the power of social networks and how even something like obesity can spread through social networks.
- [86:38]
David Hamilton
It goes to three degrees of separation.
- [86:39]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Exactly. So the point is, everything you're sort of saying and we've been discussing today is about community. It's about strong human connections. It's about how you treat those people around. You can ripple into so many more people. And I think that's a very inspiring and empowering message for all of us, no matter where we are in life or what we're trying to achieve.
- [87:04]
David Hamilton
Yeah, absolutely. I think it really all comes down to. I've said this many times. It really all comes down. Comes down to kind interactions.
- [87:14]
What's the point in not being kind? That sounds like a really silly thing to say, but I try to see the world that way. I don't always succeed. I think we're only human. We're just trying to do the best we can. But I think if we make an effort to be a kind person, a decent person, it makes you feel better, it makes that person feel better, and it just strengthens social bonds. And then you find that communities just. Just seem to work a little bit better. People tend to work a little bit better. Groups work a little bit better. When we're making an effort to be kind.
- [87:49]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And it diffuses situations. I Realize if you're really kind to someone, it's pretty hard for them to start getting angry and resentful at you.
- [88:01]
We respond to the signals we're getting in the environment around us. We respond. Even things are going on physiologically, we don't even realize. And so I think the way you treat other people.
- [88:13]
Really gets reflected back on yourself so, so much. David, you say you spend a lot of time teaching these days. Who do you teach and what do people say at the end of some of your courses?
- [88:25]
David Hamilton
A very mixture, mostly general public, oftentimes, I mean professional people, you know, NHS will come along to some. I've spoken to nhs a couple of times. I do corporate speaking, I talk to different companies and what I tend to talk to them about is kindness is the opposite of stress. And here's why and here's how give a little tools, conferences, workshops. I mean last night I did a lecture in Glasgow on the mind body connection and just a couple hundred people come along and I do like a 90 minute. So I do quite a lot of that 90 minutes just giving a talk and try to make it entertaining people there for 90 minutes. I've got to throw in a few jokes here and there, so I do a lot of that kind. So it's different kind of audiences, but it's really people who have an interest. Interest in learning about the mind body connection or learning about how kindness isn't good for your health and can make a difference in the world.
- [89:18]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I guess I can see the value for adults, I can see the value for everyone, frankly. I can also really see value for children that if we instill this in our kids in society and they grow up knowing the importance of it, experiencing the importance of it, do doing it and practicing it regularly, you just can fast forward that five, ten years into society. What then happens to society? I know and I guess in a couple of weeks I'm actually giving a talk at my children's school.
- [89:52]
For mental health week there and it's going to be around the Feel better in five plan. Because I think that five minutes on your mind, five minutes on your body, five minutes on your heart each day. I think it's a perfect wellbeing plan for any one of us, but particularly for children.
- [90:08]
In schools. They want to introduce well being into schools but everything either costs too much or takes too long. Everything in that only takes five minutes and it's free. And I haven't started to think about it yet. I think the Talk's been about 10 days, but I need to talk for about half an hour to kids and make it engaging for kids between the age of 6 and 11. And obviously I won't talk about all kinds of things with them, but I think kind of kindness. There are a couple of kindness practices in the plan, but certainly on the back of this conversation as well. I really feel that that might be a nice thing to talk about. Have you spoken about it much with kids?
- [90:45]
David Hamilton
Yeah, actually, about a dozen times. I've gone into schools, usually kind of local. Like, one of my friends is a teacher in an autism specialist unit, Glasgow, and I've been into his school about four times, I think. And then I did one of the local schools in Dunblane, where I live. I did another couple of schools, my niece's school, but each time I've gone in, I did one at Mental Health Week, actually Mental Health Week for another school, kind of local. And usually the kids are about to start or they're in the middle of a kindness project where the teachers have designed a little thing where they've to learn about kindness. They have to be kind to understand, understand what kindness is. And so they've got little things up in the board, little pictures that they've drawn about what they've done. And so the whole project is to learn about what kindness is and how do you do it, but notice how it makes you feel and notice how it affects that other person's behavior and then depending on the age of the kid, understanding a little bit more about it. And so I tend to come in because it's just novel having someone else. And I bring in my books and I bring in all the international translations, like the Japanese version, the Romanian version version, the French and the Italian version. And the kids just love having something.
- [92:06]
To pass around while I talk about kindness, because they all want to know, you'll find us yourself. They want to know about you as well. I mean, the first time I did it. Open for questions. Expecting a question about kindness. What age are you? Next question. What color is your car? But it's just so nice that the kids just want to know about you. They're being kind already because they want to know about you as well as about the kindness of the stuff. So I've really enjoyed doing it.
- [92:36]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I mean, these are great tips and I'm already thinking about how to apply them. Some of those things, I would say you can learn from everyone you come into contact with. There's always a learning there. And even that idea of giving stuff out where they're almost getting excited and Wanting to engage with you. I find that interesting. I'm. I'll probably think about what I can do about that. Any particular stories you've heard from kids or stories that you've said that they really resonate with?
- [93:02]
David Hamilton
Yeah. About kindness. What I've found really inspiring is, particularly when I went into one of the autism unit, because John, my friend John's been really pushing kindness. They've got me on the Wall, actually, is Dr. Kindness at some point.
- [93:17]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I love it. Pushing kindness. Isn't that a lovely thing to be pushing in society? You're a kindness pusher.
- [93:22]
David Hamilton
Yeah. And it's really lovely. You know, I feel part of the furniture when I've gone in, but every time I go in, when the kids see me coming, someone goes and opens the door. And then they're telling me what they've done, what they've been doing. And you hear things like, well, I've held the door. One person really inspired me, said, I decided when such and such a boy was not being very mean, I decided not to push him down. And that was a girl who was known for pushing people down. And it was such a beautiful thing that she stopped for a moment and decided to be kind. But she was totally aware that that's what she did. And I felt myself getting quite moved. But what you might think is a simple little. Most people wouldn't even notice it. But I know that she pushed people in the past and she decided to stop and understood that being kind of is not responding in that way. And I thought. It really melted me, actually.
- [94:19]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Do you make a point with kids of teaching them that, yes, it's a nice thing to do for that other person, but it's also good for you. Because I think that's gonna be a message that resonates with the kids.
- [94:30]
David Hamilton
Absolutely.
- [94:31]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
And frankly, adults. Cause we're just big kids, right. That if you don't wanna do it cause it's good for other people, do it cause it's good for yourself.
- [94:39]
David Hamilton
In actual fact, that's been a big part of all of the kindness projects that I've went into the school to talk during that kindness week. For example, a big part of it.
- [94:52]
Pushed along by the staff is how it makes you feel the importance of also being kind to yourself. I'm not trying to plug my books in, but Lady Gaga bought one of my books and she bought it for all of her staff. And it was one of my kindness books. And her mom in our office reached that charity. Born this Way foundation, reached out to me. And we Had a few conversations. Cynthia, her mom, Cynthia Geminaut, and I did a few couple of wee interviews. And I went over to the US to New York last year, and they'd invited me to participate in a kindness project. And one of the things Born this Way foundation does is they go into schools and they help children to understand what kindness is. And so I went over there and what happened is the kids at this school in Long island had. It was coming up to Christmas time, they used some of their own Christmas allowance to buy presents for the children of women staying in a temporary homeless shelter. So these kids wouldn't get presents otherwise. And all these kids at the school had used their own allowance to tell their parents, you know, can we take some of my allowance? And could I buy this fire truck for such or this game of something for such and such. And when we arrived at the school, Cynthia and I, and so of the team, the whole corridor was filled with hundreds of presents. Then the kids took the presents one at a time and they took them in and they filled an entire yellow school bus with all these presents. Then the presents were driven away. Now, part of the project was, now what happens next? Part of the project now was the kids had to learn and discuss maybe the write down or the debate, but they have to learn about the consequences of what they've done, the difference that that makes in the lives of these children who maybe wouldn't have got presents, who are the children of women in homeless shelters. But also notice how did you feel when you did that and how did you feel when you learned that that makes a difference for them? So part of what they do is get involved in these kind of projects that are really taking it right into children's hearts and minds so that they understand, not just academically, what kindness is, but how does it make you feel and notice that. And I think that it makes a huge difference to the kind of person that you become because you start to notice this feels a lot better. Better than arguing on Twitter, for example.
- [97:09]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I mean, I really like that, particularly that idea of noticing how you feel. So I know I mentioned that gratitude practice earlier on in the episode that I didn't go and expand upon, but let me just tell you what that game looks like, because the podcast has got a lot of new lists. A lot of people won't be familiar with it, but essentially for a number of years now, at our evening dinner in the Chaschi household, my wife, myself and my two kids sit down with. We have dinner, and at some point during Dinner. We play this gratitude game where we all have to answer three questions. What have I done today to make somebody else happy? What has somebody else done to make me happy? And what have I learned today? Now, what's incredible is that it has changed the dynamic of our meal times. It's changed the energy. People come in really stressed or rushing around. Suddenly, the dynamic just changes. You start to connect. You start to find out things about your family members and your kids and your wife that you wouldn't otherwise have learned if it wasn't in that setting. But what's really interesting is my kids are 7 and 9 now, so I'm guessing we started playing, I don't know, five and three or six and four, something like that. I can't quite remember now. But my kids have started to bring in their own questions. So there's now five questions in the game. We don't always play all five. It depends how tired and frazzled everyone is, but we definitely do at least three. But one of the questions that I can't remember if it was my son or my daughter who brought in was, I think it was my daughter, actually. She said, daddy, why don't we add another question? So when you did something to make someone else happy, happy, how did you feel? Right. So the fourth question is. It's going back to the first question, and it came from my kids. How do you feel? And just what you said there, noticing how you feel when you do an act of kindness, that's almost. And I think that's a really important part to sort of lock in that emotion. Lock it in.
- [99:18]
David Hamilton
I like that. Lock it in.
- [99:20]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Lock in that feeling and just sort of luxuriate in that feeling. Oh, you know, I felt it made me feel good when I held the door open for my classmate, you know, whatever it is. And I think that's a really, really important component to anything in life, frankly, but particularly these sort of things, you.
- [99:38]
David Hamilton
Know, how, you know what you're doing for your children is altering the course of their life in a really positive way. I wish that I lived, learned about kindness the way what you're doing and the way some schools are doing it. I wish our school had, for example, done a kindness project instead of us learning it later. I think what you're doing now for your kids will positively shape the course of their life because it's conditioning. It's locking that feeling in, and it's conditioning the quality of person, of people that they will become as they get older. And that will have an amazing impact on their health, but also on the quality of the relationship. Relationships and what they end up doing in the world. And it's such a beautiful thing to teach your kids about being kind, but locking in how it makes you feel. Because then it becomes, I understand this because I feel it. I'm not just something you're saying. You do this, you do that. I get this because this is how I feel.
- [100:36]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It's not just something that daddy told me to do.
- [100:38]
David Hamilton
I feel it. I've locked it in. I feel it. I feel it here.
- [100:42]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Wow.
- [100:42]
David Hamilton
Amazing. What a teaching for your children.
- [100:45]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
David, I really appreciate you saying that because I think like all parents, I'm just simply trying to do the best I can for them based upon my knowledge and my experience. Well, David, look, I have absolutely loved chatting with you today.
- [101:01]
You've written a lot of books. If you were going to direct people listening to this to one book to get going on their David Hamilton journey, what do you think is the best starting point for them?
- [101:13]
David Hamilton
Well, possibly the five side effects of kindness simply because you mentioned that it's a good starting point, but also how your mind can heal your body is one all about the mind body connection. I cover a few different subjects.
- [101:25]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, we'll link to all the ebooks in the Show Notes section. I'll also link to some really, really good blogs on David's website that are well worth reading. They're short, they won't take you long. So do check out the Show Notes page for this episode to, to sort of have access to those. David, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. And you're very clearly saying that when we're kinder to other people, when we're more compassionate to other people, we and they get more out of their lives. And my goal with this podcast is to inspire, inspire each and every listener to take action, to do something. Not just hear all this great information and go, hey, that's pretty cool. But actually turn that inspiration into action. So I wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your very top tips, things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately.
- [102:28]
David Hamilton
How about why I often find people enjoy is the seven Day Kindness Challenge. And you've got to do an act of kindness every day for seven days. But there's three ground rules. The first one is you can't count the same thing twice. So for example, if you start on a Monday and you make someone a breakfast in bed or a cup of tea or something you can do that again during the week, but it only counts the first time, so you can't count it the other day. So you've got to do seven different things. Another ground rule is at least one. You've got to push yourself a little bit. Push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. And the number three is at least one of those Acts of kindness must be completely anonymous. No one must ever know what you did or if something was done. No one must ever know that it was you that did it. And that takes yourself or the need for recognition out of the equation. So that's the ground rule. So seven Day Kindness Challenge Something different every day. Push yourself out of your comfort zone at least once and and one thing has to be completely anonymous.
- [103:29]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Man, I literally love that so much.
- [103:36]
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach the someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjeet.com.
- [104:42]
Friday 5 Now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics. Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.