In this episode of The Self Experiment, I sit down with Professor Craig Hassed, a distinguished pioneer in the integration of mindfulness into medical education in Australia.

He joins me to elucidate the profound significance of mindfulness as more than merely a meditative practice; it embodies a holistic approach to living in the present moment.

Throughout our discussion, we delve into the essence of mindfulness, emphasizing its role in fostering awareness of both external stimuli and internal states, thereby enabling individuals to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively.

Professor Hassed elaborates on the transformative potential of mindfulness, particularly in the context of modern challenges such as diminished attention spans and the pervasive influence of technology on our daily lives.

We explore practical strategies for cultivating mindfulness, including the importance of integrating brief moments of reflection into our busy schedules, which can profoundly enhance our overall well-being. As we engage with these concepts, we invite our listeners to consider how mindfulness can serve as a crucial tool for navigating the complexities of contemporary life while fostering resilience and emotional regulation.

Takeaways:

• Professor Craig Hassed has significantly contributed to integrating mindfulness into medical education in Australia.
• Mindfulness is not merely a relaxation technique; it emphasizes living in the present moment and awareness.
• The practice of mindfulness requires consistent effort and cannot be mastered overnight, akin to learning an instrument.
• Awareness of our internal states and responses can help us navigate life's challenges more effectively.
• Avoidance of challenging situations can exacerbate anxiety and hinder personal growth and resilience.
• Mindfulness training can enhance attention and focus, countering the distractions prevalent in modern life.

Foreign.

Welcome back, beautiful listeners, to the Self Experiment podcast.

Today's guest is a doctor academic and one of the early voices bringing mindfulness into medical education in Australia, Professor Craig Hesed.

Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Close.

Most often called Hasid.

So it's good.

I was going to go with that and I was, I was going to go with that and then I thought I'd.

I'd try it.

No, fair enough.

Yes.

Welcome and thank you for joining me.

It's good to be with you, Rocky.

Would you consider yourself one of the pioneers for mindfulness, bringing it to the surface in Australia or.

I suppose so.

You know, at Monash, we're the first university in the world to bring it in as core curriculum for any university subject, let alone training doctors.

And in the days I was bringing it in, it was meditation based stress management.

Because in the early 90s, mindfulness wasn't a word that was being used widely.

And I hadn't heard of the work of Jon Kabat Zinn at that time, Katz.

And so Jon Kabat Zinn was doing the work he was doing in the US from the late 70s into the 80s and I was doing what I was doing here in Melbourne and in training doctors.

I feel like mindfulness is one of those words that everyone has heard of, but I don't know if everyone's 100% aware of what it actually means.

For those who aren't.

I presume most people do think of mindfulness as being in like a retreat somewhere, doing gardening and just being away from everyone and meditation.

Can you just explain sort of the core idea of mindfulness for those who don't really understand?

Yeah, well, you can think of mindfulness as a form of meditation, but it's not just meditation.

It's as much a way of being or a way of living.

So very much being in the present moment, being aware, not sort of just running through life on automatic pilot while your mind's thinking of the past or the future.

So people often think of being, being in the present moment.

And being in the present moment is not just being aware of there's a car coming the other way on the road, or, you know, the food that you're eating is actually being aware of your internal states as well, noticing that something happens and you have a reaction to it, or noticing that your mind's gone off on a tangent.

So awareness, internal what's going on around you.

So the awareness or the attention bits, a really big part of it.

The other thing is the attitude with which we're noticing things.

Because an attitude of kind of gentleness or non reactivity, a kind of an acceptance or openness to what we're experiencing, is a very important part of being aware in a mindful way rather than a reactive kind of way, which often happens to us on automatic pilot.

Something presses our button and, and we automatically react without even thinking about it.

So mindfulness just gives us that little bit of a window to kind of notice the reaction, but to then be able to choose our response rather than automatically react in ways that are sometimes not very helpful for us.

So that kind of accepting, non judgmental, non reactive sort of attitude, and that kind of really matters from a mental health point of view because, you know, if you have a wave of anxiety, we're human, you have a wave of anxiety and you notice it, but then you hate it and desperately want to get rid of it and make it go away, et cetera, then what often happens is we actually escalate the intrusiveness of that kind of feeling.

So paradoxically, being able to notice even a wave of anxiety, but to be less reactive to it, less kind of caught up in it, makes it easier for it to come and go and cause a lot less trouble on the way through.

Does it take a lot to get to that point where you can sort of identify these, these feelings or emotions and, and have a choice?

Because especially in the world we're living in now, I feel like a lot of people are just really very, very reactive to situations.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing.

I think in, in many ways, the world as it is and technology, pace of life, we're kind of being conditioned to be more and more on automatic pilot and less and less aware.

And all the data suggests that we're getting shorter attention spans and living a more distracted life these days.

So when we start to practice mindfulness, what tends to kick in first?

And generally by 1, 2, 3 weeks, the awareness bit really starts to kick in.

If a person's practice and mindfulness meditation on a regular basis, then we'll kind of start to notice things, notice how distracted the mind is, notice our reactions more than we were noticing them before.

So that kicks in reasonably early.

But what takes longer to kick in is the attitude.

So we notice that the mind's distracted and then the mind just launches into what's wrong with me?

Why am I so distracted?

I can't stand this.

I'm hopeless, I'm not cut out for mindfulness and all that kind of stuff.

And we actually just get ourselves into loops of patterns of thinking that are not very helpful.

So it generally takes 4, 5, 6 weeks for the attitude to really start to turn.

And so we do need to sort of.

I mean, it makes no sense at all for somebody to say, oh, I tried mindfulness.

It didn't work.

That's like sitting down at a piano for the first time and saying, I tried to play, play the piano, but it didn't work.

It's like, you know, you gotta work at it.

You gotta do your scales, you've gotta build up.

And it's like that with mindfulness as well.

Yeah.

Cause I've actually tried meditation a few times and the first time I did it, I stuck with it for a very long time and it like half an hour felt like five minutes, but then I went off it and then tried to get back into it again and it started from scratch all over again.

Um, so yeah, five minutes feels like half an hour now.

But I know that like you were saying, it's one of those things where you need to keep, you need to keep at it, otherwise you don't lose it.

But it's, it's a lot harder to get back into.

Yeah, it is, it is.

And we need to see it as.

Cause what we're doing is really a significant renovation of our brain.

Because it's not just that we feel a little bit distracted.

The brain actually shows all of the indications of that.

The attention circuits in the brain are not working very well these days.

And so when we start to practice mindfulness on a regular basis, we become more aware of how distracted the mind is and more aware of the effects of that.

And like with physical exercise, sort of you don't get fit over nice.

You know, you kind of got to build up to it.

And bit by bit, the body changes itself metabolically and everything else happens that, you know, weeks and months down the track, you know, you've got a level of fitness that might have seemed a long way away way back when we started.

It's the same like that with the brain.

The brain, the neural circuits in the brain change day by day.

We're kind of, this is like a workout for some really, really important circuits in our brain.

And then they start to have, they're stronger and they're fitter and we start to experience that as the benefits that meditation provides in our day to day life.

Yeah, like I said, when I'm trying it now, yeah, I just almost instantly Just start veering off and start thinking about nothing important.

Just like, what am I having for dinner?

And I use Headspace, like the app, which is really good.

And I don't know how, but.

Or if it's just something that everyone does.

But they seem to know when I'm veering off because they keep coming back.

Don't worry if your mind's veering off.

Just come back.

And I'm like, how'd you know?

Like.

Probably not the only one.

Yeah.

Like, I wish it was something important.

Then I'd be like, well, at least it was important, but it just never is.

It's just stupid things.

Where am I going to take the dog for a walk?

What's for dinner?

I guess coming back to that, centering yourself is the hard part, and which is the main part, really.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things that happens, like noticing what you're noticing, and you're not alone in this because pretty much we all have a distracted mind most of the time.

And.

But the thing is to notice it without any mental elaboration about it.

Mind goes off to think about dinner.

It's just like, oh, you notice.

Just back to the body, back to the breath, whatever it might be, that the attention's coming back too.

Just noticing, coming back.

Very often we notice, and then the mind starts up a little dialogue.

You know, what's wrong with me?

When's this going to get better?

I wonder if my brain's really changing.

Probably not.

I'm not cut out.

It's like, none of that really helped.

Yeah.

Just back to when you were bringing it in.

Did you find any sort of pushback from the system that you were trying to introduce it into, or.

It was sort of an interesting process and how it unfolded.

The first sort of things were providing stress management workshops that were optional for medical students.

Right.

And the students were very responsive.

So they were coming in their own time.

But to learn some of these techniques to help them to manage stress and to focus better, et cetera.

And so there was a kind of a demand there.

But what happened was the year after that, the faculty had surveyed the students about a whole lot of things in relation to their studies at university.

And one of the things is they threw in a questionnaire to just measure their stress levels.

And they got the data back and they said what?

It's like these really, really high levels of stress and psychological distress among the students.

And so it's like, oh, quick, we've got to do something about this.

So who's doing anything on stress management?

Oh, there's a guy who's running stress management workshops that are going well for the students.

Give him some curriculum time.

So the students responded very well.

But because of my medical background and I kind of, in my own experience, intuitively practice what I now call mindfulness, told me to focus as a junior doctor or as a medical student, the way I taught it was just really pragmatic, really practical.

How can you stay present during a long shift?

How can you be aware of when your attention's going off while you're writing a drug chart?

How can you make sure you're listening to your patient when they're speaking to you, et cetera, et cetera?

How do you switch off at the end of a pretty full on shift?

So the kind of techniques were in a really pragmatic, practical kind of way that were taught.

And so the students related very well to it.

And the faculty was very, very supportive.

And that's not to say that there weren't people in the faculty who were very cynical and dismissive and so on.

But, you know, the proof was in the pudding from what the students were getting out of it, and the responses were very positive.

And the work of Jon Kabat Zinn was really important.

He did the first few studies and so on, but it really took off when Teasdale, Williams and Siegel kind of collaborated with Jon Kabat Zinn to use the principles of what was mbsr, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, and then to use that to develop mbct, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy.

And so they did that to use with people with recurrent depression.

And they started to find some really, really very encouraging results in terms of preventing the relapse of depression.

And that's when it went up exponentially.

And so any resistance really was less and less and less informed by science and a good rationale because the science was coming through, that this is a really important and helpful skill.

So I really haven't struck a lot of resistance.

I've had some tremendously supportive people have made space to do this work at Monash and elsewhere.

And on the back of the research, it's kind of these days, pretty much a household word, sometimes not used well, in terms of how people understand it and so on, but it's become very much a household word.

My background is law enforcement, so I was at VicPol for 13 years.

Do you think there's a reason why they don't sort of teach us at the academy for recruits in the police force or any sort of first responders that are coming out into the real world?

Is there a reason why they don't teach that in the academy?

Well, for our ambulance services.

So in training, in doing paramedicine at Monash University, mindfulness has been a part of that curriculum for a while.

It could be better, you know, reinforced.

You know, it's taught early on in the course, the sort of, I suppose, linking it better with when they graduate and how to use it in practice, it could be.

Could be more reinforced and taught in a more sort of longitudinal way.

At Victoria Police, there's a lot of interest in mindfulness, particularly in leadership development and training hasn't yet kind of filtered down in the same way, but there are resources provided for trainees.

But I think there certainly could be more development there.

It really takes people in organizations to really champion it and to kind of teach it in a contextualised way that is, well, what does a first responder need?

What is a junior policeman or woman standing on the front lines of a protest?

What do they need the aspects of mindfulness to help with emotion regulation when you've got people that are trying to press your buttons.

And really, how does it help you to make better decisions in stressful moments?

How does it help you to kind of have that ability to stand back from your reaction?

So there's lots of ways in which mindfulness can be contextualized to emphasize the particular skills, particular capacities that are important for any particular group.

It's one thing for doctors, another thing for paramedics, it's another thing for police, it's a.

It's another thing for the law, you know, so it really is different things to different people, I suppose.

Yeah.

And I guess for organizations too, you have to have the right people in the right positions and there's always a lot of turnover.

So by the time everything sort of gets in play, the next person's in that position.

So from your vantage point with, from your experience in universities, in the healthcare system, what.

What is one of the main things people get wrong about mindfulness?

I think there are quite a few things.

One of the things is, if people think of it as just a relaxation exercise, then they'll often think, oh, well, relaxing just Sitting down, nodding off to sleep.

And that might make me feel a little bit better, but I've got too much work to do, I can't afford to relax.

So mindfulness is not for me rather than understanding, it's a way of helping you to hone your focus and attention to help you to function better, you know, so.

Or to think it's a relaxation exercise.

And then a person sits down to practice and they're trying to relax, getting irritated with themselves because they can't relax.

Then that often is unhelpful for people because, you know, the harder you try to relax, often you get in a bit of a cycle of getting more tense and irritated.

And so again, coming back to that attitude of being able to notice, well, even if you're not very relaxed, just being able to in a sense be comfortable with, just with attention or you know, if you're having a wave of stress or anxiety, learning to that attitude, you know, less reactive to means it can have less and less sort of impact and can kind of quiet down over time.

By itself.

Rather than trying to relax in a sense, we learn to cultivate a calmer attitude even in the presence of things we find uncomfortable.

So that's kind of one of the big misunderstandings.

Another one is characterized by somebody who came up one time, oh, isn't mindfulness just a distraction from your worries?

It's like as if your worries are the main game in life and that's what needs your attention.

And it's kind of the opposite of that.

It's not about distraction, it's about re engagement, engaging with the things that need our attention.

Because the worrying, ruminating, catastrophizing, negative self talking aspect of mind, that's the distraction.

It's a major inner distraction and it drives things like anxiety and depression.

So one of the reasons why mindfulness helps people with anxiety and depression is it unhooks the attention from worry and rumination and re engages our attention with life.

So if you're eating a lunch, just taste the food, enjoy the taste.

If you're walking down the street, just be present, hear the birds that are singing or just feel the breeze on your face.

Like mindfulness is not a distraction, it's quite the opposite of that.

But there are a couple of ways of thinking about it.

But you know, but there are quite a few kind of misconceptions that people have.

Yeah, I was just reading a book from Paul Henry, it's a New Zealand broadcaster and he was talking about how people go to these amazing things.

Amazing Monuments.

And he was talking about once he went on Australia Day, he went to Sydney to watch the fireworks.

And soon they had the countdown.

And as soon as they got to one, all these cameras came up and he's just like, no one's actually living for like the moment anymore.

They just recording it through the cameras and that's right.

Putting it on Instagram, I guess it's like speaking on that Instagram and that obviously social media has a massive influence on how people are feeling.

I feel like a lot of people obsessed with optimization, like better habits and better routines and getting themselves into a better place.

Do you see sort of self improvement quietly becoming, turning into self pressure?

Yeah, it's an interesting question.

I think if self improvement just happens as a natural, natural part of being more aware, making more conscious decisions, not making the silly mistakes in life that we make by not paying attention.

So if self improvement just comes about as a natural side effect of living more mindfully, then mindfulness can certainly help to facilitate that.

And it's a very useful thing if self improvements occur.

Constant sort of excuse for self flagellation, self criticism, feeding an idea like, I'm never good enough, I've gotta be the best, or I'm nobody or I'm hopeless.

And constant self comparison.

A lot of social media feeds that these days.

Oh, if I knew I was like them, I'd be all right.

And so that's not a mindful thing.

And it's just really not helpful, especially for kids that these days, you know, it's just self esteem is becoming so fragile.

Resilience is being eroded by it.

The constant need for self comparison, the constant kind of sense of.

And a lot of it just feeds this internal dialogue about not being good enough and not being any good.

And so that kind of self improvement, and I suppose we could say a lot of that sort of ego based.

If you take somebody like, I don't know, think of an Einstein, oh, gee, was a pretty smart guy.

I mean, there's nothing to indicate that his enjoyment, his contribution was based on trying to be a smarter guy and trying to, trying to write a better paper than somebody else and trying to climb to the top of the.

His improvement was just driven by the passion and the curiosity and the fascination of the things he was seeing.

And so everything was just being driven by that.

And I think that's the kind of thing, and that's a much more mindful thing.

And that's the kind of self improvement I would encourage.

If it's come to a point where mindfulness and optimization has become another thing that people think that they're failing at.

Has it sort of lost its way or is that sort of marrying the culture that we're in at the moment?

Yeah, look, if it's, if we've got an idea of failing at not being good enough at, then it's not mindful.

Because in mindfulness, you know, the being good enough or not good enough and everything else, that's the kind of internal dialogue we have when we're not mindful.

So learning to go beyond that, it's a real paradox.

For example, a lot of champion athletes whose performance goes to the next level and how mindfulness helps them to do that, it's actually based on stop worrying about winning and losing, just get the eye on the ball and just enjoy the passion of the game that you love and get the love and the joy back into it and let the performance look after itself.

But when we're present, the eyes on the ball, there's engagement with what's happening.

When we're anxious, the mind's fast forwarding to the future.

What if I win, what if I lose?

Or to the past.

I stuffed up, I wasted that, et cetera.

So from a mindfulness perspective, it's not so much the self improvement happens as a natural result of being more present and more engaged and putting more joy into the things we're doing in life.

So this kind of ego based self improvement is not particularly helpful.

It's really, really hard work.

And there's this constant sort of background self criticism.

So.

And yeah, there are ways that, you know, mindfulness can help us to go beyond that.

Yep.

In the current environment that we're living in, what do you worry about how this modern culture trains, our attention, our attention span and so forth?

Well, yeah, all the data suggests that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

You ask most people and they'll say, I've got a concentration span of about 3/4 of an hour or something.

Well, research from Harvard suggests it's about.

Oh, sorry.

From Microsoft suggests it's about eight seconds.

And that's the average kind of these days.

Research from Harvard suggests that the mind's distracted about 50% of the time.

So when driving the car, eating our lunch in a conversation with somebody, about 50% of the time, the mind's out the window in a way that the person doesn't even realize.

And everything suggests that this is actually getting worse.

Now, technology is a magnificent thing.

I mean, we're using technology now to, you know, to do this podcast, et cetera and technology is a magnificent thing if it's used well.

But the evidence shows that the more that we use and overuse technology and become addicted to technology, it actually has very negative impacts on the circuits in our brain associated with the tension for one other areas of the brain as well.

But that kind of constant dopamine hit of the mind, always wanting to go to the phone to check it again, to check it again, to check it again, and it's a constant distraction.

So one of the studies say on university students, not a study I was involved with, but very interesting study done overseas, and they're looking at university students and their performance on a whole battery of executive functioning tasks.

So these are things that measure how you think and your attention, et cetera.

And so these are higher functions.

But they measured their performance in relation to where their smartphone was.

The smartphone was either in another room while they did the testing, either switched off and in their pocket or their bag while they did the testing, or switched off and face down on the desk while they did the testing.

Surprise, surprise, the students performed significantly worse, especially if the phone was face down on the desk, even though it was turned off and face down.

Significant drop in performance across all the measures.

A little bit better if it was turned off in the phone or the in the pocket of the bag.

Best of all, if the phone was in another room.

Why?

Because the mind kept going to the phone, especially if it was within eyeshot.

So this is a real challenge these days.

And so if you look at lots of, like, important things, like why is the road toll going up again?

You know, most of it's related to distracted driving.

There's also alcohol and drugs that are associated.

But the big growth area is distracted driving.

People cannot keep their attention on the road even when they're driving in 100km down a freeway with cars everywhere.

And so this is really a practical issue, not just a theoretical one.

Do you think this ban on social media for children is going to work, or are they just going to find a way around it?

I'm sure a lot of kids will try and find their way around it.

And so will it work in that regard?

Well, there'll be kids who will want to or get around it and will probably will.

If they can find better ways of trying to reduce that number, then well and good.

I think if it helps to shift attitudes of parents and kids to sort of say, hey, there are other ways I can engage in life, like, oh, I can't be connected to anybody.

Well, research in schools shows that if for example, you have the playground is screen free, like no screens, no phones, no iPads or anything.

During playtime, kids interact more, they're more physically active.

So it's not like, oh, I can't connect with my friends through this, this puts down and people start to connect in a more direct way.

And I think if kids can start to rediscover a more active physical activity, but also more active forms of play and interaction, more direct face to face interaction, it'll be very good for their mental health but also very good for their attention and physical health as well.

So I'm big.

I mean, I've spoken to a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and principals conferences and various things for many, many years saying the writing's been on the wall for a long time.

So I'm quite a supporter of and in admiration for those who trying to do some hard yards to sort of get some boundaries around this and teach kids when they're young to find ways of relating to each other and then, and then later on to sort of start to engage with social media.

But we haven't done a good job of cleaning up the social media sort of terrain and it's left kids really, really vulnerable and it's done terrible things for their mental health.

Well, the ban itself is long overdue.

Like, I don't know, like there's so much out there that they see, so much that I probably wouldn't have seen.

They've seen it at like 10, 11, 12 and I probably wouldn't have seen it till I was like 18, 19.

And I feel like a lot more, not even, well, a lot more kids are stressed because I feel like they need to.

Well, they probably feel like they need to live up to what they've seen on social media, even though half of it's been curated to look like that and they're not actually living like that.

Us as a whole community, I feel a lot more stressed for whatever reason it is.

From your perspective, what's the real problem itself?

Is it the stress or is it our relationship to the stress?

I think it's going to be a bit of both.

So the kind of stuff that a lot of social media feeds, the patterns of thinking, ways of relating poorly to people that happen on social media, they start to get translated into the playground, into the world at large.

None of that's really helpful.

So we're living in a more challenging environment.

But it's also how we relate to stress as well.

I think both things are going to be involved if we Think, oh well, I'll do a little bit of mindfulness or just, or take myself to some sort of little walled off place, live in a little virtual reality bubble where I don't have anything which is challenging for me, et cetera.

That's not going to lead to a resilient, capable kind of human being who can expand their capacities and so on.

We actually thrive from being challenged.

Now we don't want to get challenged to the point where we're flooded and overwhelmed with something that we're not ready and capable of dealing with.

We kind of need the challenges to sort of build up over time in a way, but to learn to have an attitude of taking on more and being able to cope with challenge, to learn to deal with adversity constructively and well and so on, to learn experiences, life lessons from it.

So those kind of capacities I think really need to be taught to kids.

Because if kids or even parenting, we think, oh, we just wall ourselves off from challenge, it's really not going to serve us very well in the longer run.

And it's like saying, well, I mean, just in terms of getting fit or getting stronger muscles, you know, in a sense we have to challenge the muscles by learning to lift weights.

I mean, if you try to lift too heavy your weight too soon, you're going to hurt yourself.

And it's the same.

But we learn to lift slowly, heavier and heavier weights over time till we build up and to sort of think, oh, I don't want to challenge myself.

It's like never lifting anything until the muscles really waste away.

And it's like that with our coping muscles.

If you like, I need a bit of challenge and then we can sort of develop our capacities as we grow up.

With dealing with stress.

Is there anything that people do that you think deepens the problem or is there anything out there that you've seen people do that you think that's probably going to make it worse or well.

Avoidance is one of the things.

Now mind you, there are all sorts of things that we want to and that we need to avoid.

Putting ourselves in really dangerous situations, for example, that might be not the right thing to do, might not be safe.

I mean that's something that's worth avoiding doing something that's really, really risky, that in coming a cropper.

But there's a difference between that and the things that come up in life that do need our response.

I can remember as a medical student just in the very early days of studying medicine, if you put me anywhere near blood and gore and Body parts and all this kind of stuff.

I just literally felt like I wanted to pass out.

And I kind of.

And I was going into medicine because I was interested in the mind and maybe a future looking at mental health and so on.

And so I kind of.

But, you know, you gotta deal with dissection.

It's a part of doing a medical course.

And so in the weeks leading up to that, I kind of thought, well, look, this is not something I cope with very well.

So I decided to just, bit by bit, this is my teenage kind of mind.

But I thought, bit by bit, I'm going to expose myself a little bit closer and a little bit closer to the things I'm going to have to deal with in a few weeks from now.

So just standing at the end of a long corridor where the dissection room was at the end.

And I thought, I'll just stand here and just feel a mild sense of revulsion about what's at the end of that corridor and just learn to feel comfortable with it.

I just like, you know, and the next day, went back, went a bit further down the corridor, a little bit closer to it, and just felt those feelings.

But just learn to feel comfortable with those feelings, Just let them come and go.

And so a little bit closer, a bit closer, until could actually step into the room and just let those feelings be there and just let them ebb and flow without getting caught up in them.

Just kind of an ability to.

But I didn't realize what I was doing.

But I was.

I was intuitively practicing this kind of desensitization practice, but exposing myself to the challenge and learning to then take it step by step further until when dissection came along, I was fine with it.

And so the thing of exposing ourselves.

But avoidance, if I avoid that, I just try.

Or if we feel uncomfortable about public speaking and then we just try to avoid anything.

And situations in life come up where you might need to say a few words, but avoid it.

Oh, I'm sorry, I can't make it to the event.

Or, you know, if we avoid something, then what happens is that the challenge seems bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

But conversely, our sense of trust in our own capacities gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

And that avoidance really goes to the heart of a lot of different kinds of anxiety, you know, when.

So.

But if we learn to just kind of safely take small steps to step into a situation, then over time, the situation becomes less and less and less intimidating.

But our kind of sense of confidence in our own capacity kind of grows and grows and grows.

And if we can teach kids to do that in a kind of a safe, secure, proving sort of environment, then kids can develop confidence, get a sense that, hey, I can take on things in life if I want to take them on, if I need to take them on, I can do that.

I've got a confidence to do that.

And I think that's a great thing to give a kid for their future life and development.

Remember growing up I had a, I had a stutter, so words just wouldn't come out.

And then when they wouldn't come out, obviously it would make it worse.

And then later on in life I ended up being on radio, being part of a music group, doing this, being a valedictorian for my squad at VicPol.

And I think it was just about slowly being more confident because I feel like the stutter was me being not as confident as most of the other kids were.

And I feel like, yeah, it was me slowly, you know, gathering a voice, I guess over the years.

And then, and now I love public speaking.

I could do it all the time.

And then, you know, and then when I think back and you think of that five, six year old that couldn't get any words out.

Yeah, it's a good feeling.

Yeah, well, that's right.

And for me, public speaking, such a fear of it, like full on panic about it.

And getting involved in medical education where as a lecturer is like, why are you putting yourself into that situation?

Well, I put myself in there because there were things that weren't being taught that I felt needed to be taught to young doctors, things that I wasn't taught about.

So I kind of thought, well, I'm just going to have to learn to develop a capacity to work with it.

And so over time that's what happens.

But I think this is in some ways fears and anxieties present for us the biggest opportunities for growth.

And so just trying to protect ourselves from things that challenge us kind of denies us the opportunity for growth.

And so it needs to be done with care, especially in the bringing up of kids.

But I think as a life rule, it's surprising how those things that often were our greatest fear at one stage or another become like the things we most enjoy and really engage in.

Yeah, I think also making it more, making the whole situation more sort of breaking down those walls because I remember doing the fellow Victorian speech at the Academy, just doing the run through like the few days beforehand, Chief Commissioner was there, the big boss, and he was right at the front.

And I Remember marching up like there was no one there.

It was just a run through.

But I remember just marching up, being worried about I'd get the step wrong, being worried about the speech.

And I remember getting to the podium and then the chief commissioner goes to me, don't say the whole thing, just pick a line, say it and then just walk away.

I was like, okay.

So I looked at my speech, found the shortest line and it was thank you.

And I just said thank you and walked away.

And he started laughing.

And then after that, like, I just felt more comfortable like everywhere, like it was just.

Yeah, I think that was my sort of way of breaking down those, those barriers because even though I was keen to do it, you know, you do get nervous about doing public speaking, no matter how much you enjoy it.

So.

So part of that, I guess, was for me breaking down that, that wall, that if I can make this person laugh, who is the chief commissioner, who's got more things on his plate than, you know, I probably ever will, if I can make him laugh for two seconds, like, you know, what's the worst that could happen after that?

I know a lot of people who I speak to, especially even my family and ex members from the police or current members from the police who will be listening.

If any of them feel like overwhelmed or quietly exhausted.

Where would you suggest that they begin without?

Turn it into a bit like another big project for them to do just to get mindfulness in their life, just to quiet it down a bit.

Well, I think one of the things we can do, I often use a metaphor like punctuating our day with full stops and commas.

If you read a book and it didn't have any punctuation in it, it just kind of becomes a blur and words trip over each other and it kind of loses its meaning and sense.

I think life's a little bit like that when we don't punctuate it.

So maybe two full stops a day, you know, and it doesn't have to be half an hour practice, but it could just be a few minutes, four or five minutes maybe early in the day before we get into our working day and getting on with things so early.

Right.

Early in the day, maybe sometime before breakfast as a way of moving into the day mindfully.

And then maybe in the early part of the evening after the main part of our working day, you know, just to practice again sometime after work's finished and before we get into whatever we're going to do that evening.

So two full stops, five minutes of some mindfulness.

Meditation, starting off with something that's guided, if that, if that really helps.

But what can be really, really helpful are having lots of little commas in the day.

So when I was doing really long shifts as a doctor and you know, like when I was an intern, you know, you had your normal Monday to Friday working week, but if you had a weekend on as well in between, that was a 64 hour shift without a break from early Saturday morning to late Monday night.

And so 64 hours, no sleep, just going from one thing to another.

And I kind of realized you got to conserve every molecule of energy you can.

And so, you know, at the end of just finishing, you know, dealing with one clinical situation, write up some notes and about to head off to the next, I just take a breath, you know, and it just told me to kind of mentally leave the last situation and now just have this mental downtime as I walk from one ward to another.

So that two minutes of walking, and I didn't have the language for it, but just walking mindfully, just being present, just giving yourself some mental rest as you walk from one point to another.

There's nothing more complicated happening now than just walking from point A to point B.

Keep simple moments simple.

I would step into the next situation with a calmer, more attentive state of mind to deal with the next complex situation.

Then two minutes of mental downtime to the next.

So what I found was that even a really full on two and a half days without sleep was full of lots of opportunities for mental rest.

And actually it was an absolute lifesaver, certainly for myself, probably for the patients as well, I suspect.

So those very simple things of full stops and commas keep simple moments simple.

And when we physically leave work, mentally leave it as well.

How do we mentally leave it?

We're not trying to stop thinking about it so much as using our best to engage with what's in front of us now.

And even if it's, you know, people often say, I just love doing something menial, something physical.

I mean, we've got a plum tree out the back and the birds are going like crazy for the plum tree.

And so there are lots of half eaten plums falling out of the tree all the time or just sweeping the driveway, if not every day, every second day, just sweeping it, just being in the present moment, you know, feeling a broom.

Yes, it just really helps to reduce that mental load.

But funnily enough, it also helps us to be more present when we are doing the complex work we might be doing.

So living mindfully the formal practice, but then the informal practice of mindfulness means to be mindful, to be present, to be engaged while we're doing something.

Yeah.

I remember when I was with Vic Pol, a lot of people would wear the uniform to work, put a hoodie on so they weren't noticed, but I never would.

So my routine, leaving work every day would be get changed, get the uniform off.

Once that uniform's off, that's it, no more thinking about it.

Get in the car, take three deep breaths in and then away we go.

And then it's a brand new.

I guess that was my comma for the day in your speak.

Yeah.

And then once I drove away, that was it.

No more.

Obviously there's times and cases where it would just stick in your mind and a lot of us still do.

But I guess that was my way of breaking it up from work to home to home life.

So there wasn't.

No, I tried to, there always was.

But I tried to limit the sort of crossover between the two.

Yeah.

Because if one was bad then the other one would get bad.

Just because.

Yeah.

And I think it's probably one.

I mean what you're practicing is exactly what I was describing before.

But.

But I think one of the things that's making it increasingly hard for people these days is technology that you've got it in the palm of your hand the whole time and so just on the way home checking some more emails and things or getting home, kids there coming up and you're half baked attention with them while half an eye's on the email inbox or whatever it might be.

So the technology very often has meant that work is invading our personal spaces even more, especially if the phone's by the bed and just checking stuff in the middle of the night and so on.

Not helpful.

So great to be able to put some separation between that and part of that I think is using technology in a way where we're in control of it rather than it's controlling us.

Yeah, I mean there's technology is great if you can use it correctly.

I mean there's those social media apps, Deep Stack and all that that are like teaching you stuff instead of being envious of whoever's got the most money and the biggest muscles and stuff out there.

What do you think?

1 what question?

What question do you think that we should be asking ourselves more often?

What question?

I think a good question is to understand ourselves better.

Just like who am I?

Because often we never even ask the question or if we do the questions immediately close down with I'm a this, this, this and this.

And we define ourselves in a whole bunch of ways according to what we do or, you know, what football team we barrack for and whatever it might be.

But I think if we can just not assume all those labels define who we are or limit who we are, you know, what am I underneath all of that?

You know, am I limited by all those things?

You know, is there a way of expanding, being a little bit more universal than that?

So I think the question of who am I?

Or understanding ourselves better is probably a pretty good question to ask at very least from time to time in our lives, if not regularly.

I guess it'd be one of those questions too that you'd have to work at.

I don't think the answer would come straight away for a lot of people because when you do ask someone who are they?

They would normally say their job title.

I think not necessarily who they are, because I was reading a book the other day and they were talking about.

Well, it was Can't Break Me by David Goggins.

And he was saying that he had to be honest with himself about who he actually was before he could change his lifestyle.

And just being honest, putting things up on the mirror so he'd have to see it every day, reminding himself of exactly who he had become and that changed to who he is now, which is one of the greatest, like marathon runners and he's just a savage.

That don't make people like him normally.

I also read a book, Own the Day, Own youn Life, which is about certain aspects of the day that we can sort of try and get right to have.

Hopefully that one perfect day.

In that aspect, what does a sort of a well lived day look for you?

Oh, I think the more present I can be.

It's funny.

Yeah.

I'm not even sure what the perfect day is.

I mean, if the perfect day is everything goes just the way I want it to go.

Okay, well, I don't know, maybe one day I'll have a day like that sometime in my life.

I'm not sure.

But there are always things that don't quite go the way that you expect or hope.

But I can remember lots of days that don't get that go the way or things happen that are not the way I'd like them to be.

But when I can turn towards those situations, accept them, be totally open to them and engage with them consciously and with the best principles I can, in a funny kind of way, they're often the best moments.

Looking at Them when they're coming up, they look like the worst days.

Meeting them in the right kind of way, looking back at them, they were the best days.

I learned the most about myself or I shifted some kind can't cope with it.

And you discovered that you can or, you know, they're often ways in which we.

They're the days that are most formative for us.

So.

Yeah, so I'm not even sure what the perfect day is, but if I can meet life like that more and more often, I think I'll be happy.

Yeah.

And I think that was the point of that book as well.

It's got.

Because it does have mindfulness in there.

Using your peripheral grays, binaural beats and just accepting what comes to you, dealing with it the best you can.

But still living that day as best you can, I guess, is what the point of that book is.

Just before we wrap things up, always trying to end with just one experiment that you would like to put in the hands of the listeners or a quote or just something for them to think about overnight or tomorrow or whenever they listen to this.

Yeah, well, I guess a lot of it has been about being in the present moment and that wisdom traditions have written a lot about that over millennia, really.

So I suppose the experiment is to see what it would be like to do one thing in the day consciously, intentionally and fully present.

And by fully present, I mean kind of really engage your senses, you know, like if you're eating, tasting the food, smelling if you're.

If you.

Whatever you're doing, even if you're brushing your teeth, doesn't matter if it's a mundane thing, but to be fully present out of our heads and just into the moment.

So to do at least one thing in the day like that, and then maybe to practice doing a couple of things in the day like that and even mundane moments, you know, and to fill our day with more and more of that.

We get so preoccupied about the future and the what ifs and the maybes rather than what is at the moment or what ifs.

You know, I had, you know, in the past and this.

So just to live more fully present.

So to treat that as an experiment and do it on a consistent basis and in a week and two weeks and four weeks, just see what you find.

I had a guest on Josh Perini, and we're talking about the Power of Now by Cart Tolle, which is pretty much exactly what you're talking about.

Being present, whatever has been that's in the past can't change it, whatever's in the future that hasn't even happened yet anyway, so just being present, I think a lot of people right now, because I know I do just go through the motions of a day.

Some days when you wake up, it's just one of those days where you just get out, brush your teeth, you do everything without even sort of realizing you've done it.

And being present is one of those things where I try to do, try to savor it, especially occasions, special occasions with family or going out and experiencing different things, trying to experience it firsthand and really let it soak into me, which is very hard these days in the environment that we live in.

Have you, are you, you're an author?

Yeah.

Tell us about the book before we finish up.

Well, there are 17 books I've authored or co authored with colleagues, so perhaps the book I'll mention that should be coming out later on this year, Mindfully Rational.

But it's a book all about how mindfulness can help us with critical thinking.

And so that book I've been working on with a couple of colleagues from Monash and so it'll be.

Because a lot of people think that, well, mindfulness, it's different.

Critical thinking means critiquing and you're thinking, et cetera.

And so mindfulness is not about that.

But I think mindfulness understood and critical thinking properly understood, they actually work very well together because there's so much of a need, I think in the modern day to help people to be a little bit more reflective, a little bit more able to stand back from and reactions and to be able to engage in constructive dialogue about important questions.

So that kind of critical thinking, I think there's a big need for it in the modern world.

Definitely.

And have we got a release date for that book?

No, not yet.

No, not yet.

We're in the final draft stage.

But if want something to read that's out there now.

So Mindfulness for Life with publishing.

So that book kind of, it's got lots of different applications of mindfulness in lots of different domains from managing stress and mental health and chronic pain and work and learning education.

So if you want a kind of an all round book on mindfulness, Mindfulness for Life wrote with a colleague, Stephen McKenzie and so that's with Exile Publishing.

And that's on Audible.

Did you, did you narrate it yourself?

No, no, it can get it as an ebook.

It can also, you know, get it.

I, I actually like to have the physical book in my hand.

Bit old fashioned like that.

Yeah, no, that's what my wife likes, too.

And I like audible to a point where only if it's good, a good voice narrating it.

If it's not, if it's no good, just ruins the whole book for me.

So in that regards, I do like a book, but when I look at any books, I either see if it's a if it's the author or a voice that I'm aware of, because sometimes you get those audible books and it's just no good, because the person narrating it is no good.

So, yeah, looking forward to that book coming out.

Really appreciate your time.

Something that I'm I've been passionate about trying to get back into it.

So it's been very enlightful.

And I appreciate your time.

Been a real pleasure, Rocky, to everyone.

Out there, as always, look after yourself and look after your people.