The Paul Taylor PodcastHow To Contain Your Brain and Worry Less, With Clinical Psychologist Dr Lillian Nejad
The voice in your head - is it always helpful, or do you struggle with it. If the answer is the latter, or the case for someone close to you, this podcast is for you.
In this episode I chat with clinical psychologist Dr Lillian Nejad about the state of mental health today and we explore a range of reasons why it's so bad, especially for teenagers.
We then go on to focus on the critical role of attention in mental health and explore a range of lifestyle factors that both inhibit and promote good mental health and discuss a genius strategy for containing worry and anxiety.
Check out Dr Nejad's website for her her courses, free stuff, corporate offering and her brilliant app.
Doctor Lillian Najad, Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. Paul.
So you are a clinical psychologist. Tell me how did you get into that? What was what first spiked your interest.
In doing it?
Because it's a long old road of study, isn't it.
It is.
Probably nine or ten years actually in total. Well, it's an interesting story. I think my choice was based on lifestyle, surprisingly enough, so I went you might recognize my accent as being American. So I went to university in the States, and I was on a path towards law school, and I really do think my mind's probably geared towards that. But when I was in I was doing psychology as a major, and I got to do some really interesting projects like go to the UK and study children, and I got to really see how my psychology professors lived and what their lives were like, and what their environment working environment was like. And it really appealed to me. And so I'm like, do I want to spend my life reading law books in the library, or do I want to be on a campus full of vibrant learners and teach people things and have a career that had a lot of variety in a beautiful environment as well. So actually that's so I started going down the path of psychology instead, and then I ended up moving to Australia and doing my postgraduate education here, so it was like a master's in PhD com buying program. And during the course of that was when I discovered that I really enjoyed doing the clinical work and that probably academic life well it's very different here anyway, so I wasn't going to have what I was envisioning anyway. But it turned out that I really enjoyed doing the direct clinical work and seeing that process of change that people go through in that space. So that's why I continued to do that for my career for the most part.
So you went down the road of practitioner rather than academic I did.
I did experiment with academia for a few years in the middle of my career just to check that I did the right thing, and I enjoyed my time as an academic and lecturer, but I really prefer the direct clinical work and everything that comes with that.
So let me get throw some statistics at you and I want to get your opinion, so we know that right now. The Cochran Australia Review showed that one in seven Aussies, one in e It Brits, one in the Kiwi's and I think from memory in the States is about to seem are on antidepressants like one in seven to one in eight of US and in Australia where the second highest consumers of antidepressants in the OECD countries.
What is going on?
Yeah, that sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. I think part of what's going on is that we saw a massive spike in anxiety and depression during and after the pandemic, so a lot more people were experiencing significant stress. And often what happens when people do experience those kinds of symptoms as they go see their general practitioner for help, and which is what you want them to do. But what can happen sometimes is medications can be used as a first line intervention, and sometimes that's appropriate. Most of the time that's appropriate alongside therapy, and sometimes only therapy is necessary. Really just depends on what the person's presenting with. Generally, the clinical guidelines talk about depression treatment sort of best practice is therapy alongside an antidepressant potentially, whereas anxiety disorders are sometimes often sometimes and maybe often now treated with antidepressants as well. That's not necessarily the first line of treatment for an anxiety disorder. Generally, psychological therapy can really assist on its own with most anxiety disorders. So potentially there might be more medication being used than is needed. But at the same time, we definitely see that more and more people are experiencings psychological distress, and that's maybe partly due to what we went through a few years ago, and it hasn't completely alleviated yet. But also there's a number of factors that are kind of impacting us in society and just in our daily lives that are causing people to feel more anxious and more depressed and experiencing things like burnout as well and having trouble sleeping, and those are kind of like the top the top things that are concerning people at the moment.
Yeah, and I think we will do definitely a deep dive into those things. I think a massive contribution to this. So there's two There's two things. Number one, eighty five percent of psychiatric medication in this country is prescribed by non psychiatric doctors, which I find absolutely bonkers. And as you said, but I think with the pandemic, I think what it did with such a shortage of psychologists, the default then just became to go on an antidepressant for both depression and anxiety because there was just such a shortage of psychologists.
And psychiatrists yes.
And psychiatrists yeah.
And then when people are in that, I mean, we know not the withdrawal effects when you try to come off are pretty horrendous. We won't do a deep dive in this because I'm going to talk to doctor Mark Horowitz about that, because he's a real expert on this and he's written the Maudesley d prescribing guidelines.
I mean, he's of the viewers.
Several are that about fifty percent of people who are on these medications could get off them with GP help or with other assistants. But I think what also plays into this that nobody talks about is that number one, only twenty percent of Australians hit the recommended guidelines for physical activity. And we know that that is massive, like exercise is a more effective treatment for depression than antidepressants for mindor depression. But also I think the ultra processed food consumption in this country is crazy. We are in the top six in the world. Those other companies that I talked about Australia and New Zealand are sorry in UK, New Zealand and the US are all in the top six of the world. And you know this is not your area, so you probably haven't seen it. But very recently there was an Umbrella review, a review of systematic reviews published on ultraprocessed foods and find class one convincing evidence that increasing ultra processed foods increase the risk of anxiety about forty eight percent, to common mental health disorders by fifty three percent. Right, you take those two, You take the fact that we're spending a shitload of time on screens, especially use absolutely that is then then interfering with sleep, and we know that sleep deprivation in and of itself can cause anxiety and depression or can can massively increase your risk. For me, when you take our lifestyle combined with eating shit food, not sleeping well, too much time on screens, and not exercising, I don't think he can expect to be of good mental health if not your lifestyle.
Yeah, absolutely, you have to have the basics covered to reduce your vulnerability to stress, to chronic stress to challenges to psychological stress. And even though it's basic, right, these are just foundational things everybody knows, like the five things right, nutrition, physical activities, social connection, relaxation, and sleep. You know, we need these things to keep us well. But as you say, they can also be used as interventions, you know. Often. It's funny because I have I remember seeing a client a long time ago, and she was coming in for anxiety and I was out, you know, doing the normal assessment that you do with someone and asking her the questions, and I usually ask a about substance use and abuse as part of that, and there wasn't really any alcohol use or anything like that. The next time I saw her, I remembered I forgot to ask about smoking and coffee, and so I asked her about that and turned out she was smoking I think three packs of cigarettes a day and having eight cups of coffee before she even left the house in the morning. Cops, Yeah, eight and like maybe twenty five total a day. So jumping Jesus exactly. So if I hadn't asked that question for those questions, I would have been treating anxiety and it wouldn't have been really doing anything, because I the main to start with really needs to be let's reduce these stimulants in your system which were astronomical, Like, no one's going to be able to function well or sleep well or manage their anxiety under those conditions. So it is really important to assess those factors as well and encourage people to make those basic foundational changes when you're treating anxiety, depression, or any other kind of mental health condition.
Yeah. Absolutely so.
Look, you specialize, and I mean you do lots of different stuff, but one of the things that you specialize in is anxiety disorders, which we know is increasing and particularly amongst teenage girls. And we say particularly from social media coming in and the smartphone. I think when they came in at twenty and ten, Like the anxiety rioates, the self harm rates, the suicide riots amongst teenage girls went crazy boys increased, but nowhere the year as much as teenage girls. Are you seeing similar things in your practice that there's more and more teenage girls coming to you and presenting with anxiety.
I generally see people who are eighteen and over. However, I am I do inform myself of what's actually going on amongst the youth population, and I do see young women who are eighteen, nineteen, twenty twenty one, so.
I think.
I think the status seventeen percent of Australians have experienced and anxiety to sort in the last twelve months, and like you said, among certain groups it's much higher. And among women in general it's always been higher than among men. So it actually makes us that among girls it would be higher than boys. But it's interesting that it's spiking even more so, and possibly part of the reason for that is the impact of social media and the way that women are treated on social media is quite different to how men may experience it, which could potentially cause not just anxiety, but a whole other, whole range of other issues. But certainly, yes, it's a problem.
I've got another little little theory which I think contributes to this, right, and it's an area that you're familiar with, which is workplace, Bernard. So there's been a number of studies because I was diving into this for my PhD, so a number of studies that have shown and these are studies that follow people over a couple of years and do fMRI studies of their brand and ask them about the amount of stress in their life and then reimage their brands. And what they've seen from these studies is that people who report significant and continuous workplace stress, we see significant structural and functional changes in the brain. So there are Migdala's hypertrophy, the frontal lobe shrink and because stress kills off neurons in the frontal lobes, and it affects women more than it does men, right, significantly. And I was wondering about this, and I think, and you know, this is just purely speculation on my point, but I think that's a there's an evolutionary biology effect here, right, that it makes perfect sense to me if we think of caveman days and where we've developed from, and the fact that our genome hasn't changed in forty five thousand years, right, that's from Professor Frank book. So we have a hunter gatherers genome, and the men were out hunting and the women were gathering and bringing up the young and protecting the young. So it makes perfect evolutionary sense to me that females would be more hypervigilant to stress and more affected by stress than meals. Right, And because of that, you really don't as a species want your men who are out hunting to be hyper vigilant to stress and threat but it is an advantage if the females are because they're looking after the young.
And all of that stuff.
I just wanted to get your thoughts, and I mean, it's sure speculation.
Well that's really interesting. I think part of that also, like you said, whatever you practice is what kind of how your brain develops. So if you've had evolutionarily men being the hunters and gatherers and approaching dangerous situations and threatening situations all the time for the survival of their families, then their brains are wired in a way to withstand that better. Because I mean, if you think about the treatment for anxiety, part of it is exposure therapy, right. So, right, so they've just been if you've got to say, working on your theory, you've got males with male brains and they're constantly exposing themselves to anxiety provoking situations. Then over time their brains have developed some resilience to that, whereas, like you said, with females, their job was different and so it wasn't to approach threats, it was to avoid. So an avoidance is really counter to the treatment of anxiety. But it was functional then because they needed to do that to stay safe and survive. It's not functional now because most are the things that people feel anxious about aren't actually dangerous. Yeah, correct, but our brains don't know that. So it's about learning and understanding what is the function of anxiety and being able to decipher for yourself what's actually going on. But also is it functional or dysfunctional? Is this serving me or not? Because sometimes it might be, but most of the time it's the people that I see. It's it's often misfiring. It's you know, it's signaling a threat that doesn't actually exist, or it's exaggerating a threat that might that you know, people are thinking may happen, or it's lasting longer than it needs to, or it's occurring more frequently or intensely than it needs to. So all of those issues make anxiety dysfunctional. Whereas if it's actually signaling a real threat and it's communicating to you that you need to do something about that, and it's helping your body prepare to deal with it, and it's motivating you to take effective actions to manage the threat, then it's working and you want anxiety in your life for that purpose.
Yeah, absolutely, one hundred percent now on that theme. So this is a bit of a long winded question and I'll get your opinion on it. So that whole exposure slash avoidance and again this is just a personal opinion, but just you know, I have an eighteen year old daughter, so I kind of know what goes on. I know what goes on in schools, I know what goes on in universities. For me, there is a real danger that well intentioned awareness and intervention campaigns can potentially be contributing to this. So we know that universities now and schools are completely littered with trigger warnings around everything, and that people can opt out of things. And there's a nice meta analysis done of trigger warnings that showed that in quite a lot of cases they make things worse and even for people with PTSD because they encourage avoidance behaviors.
Right, So, but thinking about the amygdala as well. For me, if you're.
Constantly being told this might be upsetting, this might be something that you don't want to see.
Every time that.
Happens, you're a Migdala sits right up and goes, oh, hold on, a minute, there's there's threat here, and I actually think that we are potentially potentiating people's brains to stress and threat and also with that, again well intentioned stuff, so much discussion about mental health. I actually think we've probably gone too far for some people, particularly very impressionable young people.
Yes, really interesting are looking.
For an identity, right because you look at it and the stats are the way worse in schools and in universities. And I'm talking to lots of businesses right now that are saying that people are coming out of university with absolutely no resilience whatsoever. What's your thoughts on that as a theory.
Yeah, look, I think that's super interesting. I think that on one hand, we want we know that there's information overload that's causing a lot of stress, and we want to effectively limit that to some degree so that you're not exposing yourself all the time to trauma and disaster and problematic news and all of that sort of stuff. And at the same time, you don't want want to shelter people too much to the realities of life, correct, Right, So people have to know how to deal with challenging situations, and they won't know how to do that unless they are challenged. And so I think it's a balance, right that we have to kind of maybe we've gone you know, sometimes when things are transitioning from literally nothing about mental health and well being right, and no sensitivity at all about what might be triggering to somebody and what might be traumatic information for somebody to receive too, the overcorrecting which sometimes happens in that transition of like now we need to put a lot of focus on and talk about all the time, and perhaps the balance is still off and we need to kind of create more of a balance with that. I think with resilience, the research that I've done on resilience, it's three factors that contribute to building resilience, and the most important thing is who's who are the people around you are? Do you have close, supportive, positive relationships not only that support you, but also model the use of skills, the use of the challenge, you know, going through challenges and seeing how they can do that effectively, seeing how people around you can deal with distress and approach things rather than avoid things. And that's number one, and then number two would be your own self belief, your mindset, your yes, that's right, self efficacy, all of those things. And then the third is like your skills, Like what skills do you have to deal with the challenges, the ups and downs of life, to deal with the potential you know that the expected things. We're all going to go through challenges, so we have to expect and accept that we will. So do you have the skills to manage stress stressful situations? Do you have the skills when you're confronted with information that is distressing to manage that? Do you know what works for you to calm down and to reduce physical or cognitive symptoms of anxiety? Those are really important. And also you know, obviously those aren't the only skills. There's our communication skills, into personal skills, social skills. I mean, there's so many skills that we need to kind of function effectively in the world. But those three things, in combination with people being at the you know, the the heart of it, like number one, are really important to build resilience. So in what ways are we not supporting young people two build those skills that they need to develop a mindset that is optimistic and determined and persevere and willing and courageous and willing to approach challenging situations and who are who is there to support young people and to show them the way. Really, m.
I think there's a I wholeheartedly agree with all of that. I think there's something extra in there as well, and my PSDs on resilience and hardiness.
And for me, there.
A huge element of this is been the environment that we're brought up in. That is has been shaped over the last decades, starting in the nineteen eighties with the whole self esteem movement that came out of the United States that boosting people's self esteem falsely, and now this whole movement of helicopter parenting and coddling kids and keeping them away from stress and going oph the you know they've been through, they've been through COVID.
We need to protect them.
And so I'm going to give you one of my favorite quotes on this from Epictetus, the historic philosopher, who two thousand years ago said we must all undergo a hard winter training and not enter into lightly that for which we have not prepared. And he was talking about life. You know, I believe there's I mean, there's so many factors that come into it, but I believe it's pretty significant that our kids are too sheltered, and particularly in this country, Like people who say Australia is hard, it's not hard. This country has it easier than the vast majority of the world's population. And you know, when people talk about COVID being traumatic, our grandparents went to war. It's not worse than COVID nine. I know there was a lot of mental health issues that came out that weren't even acknowledged or addressed or those sorts of things. But what I'm getting at is that the hardest thing you've ever feest is the hardest thing you've ever feest, and that becomes a barometer for what is tough.
Do you get my point?
I do. I understand what you're saying. Look, for sure, there's a lot of things in pop culture that have been damaging. I think that's one correct. There's certainly things now that I find really harmful that are prolific in our culture now. And and also that start it would have started like twenty you know, the positive thinking movement that started twenty years ago, right, this idea that we should be thinking a certain way all the time, and that destructive or negative thoughts are bad and should be avoided at all costs. It's absolutely impossible. It's impossible. But also what you've created, and this might in my theory, is these kinds of thoughts have or belief systems that have come through wherever somebody's written a book and people everyone you know is proliferated via OPRAH or somebody that people are afraid of themselves. So for instance, like if you say, if you say your thoughts have the power to you know, if you think positive believe, then you will get what you want in life.
Right, you can manifest, you can manifest the universe.
Right.
So if that's the case, then what happens if you have depression or PTSD and all your thoughts are filtered through those disorders, and they're going to have a negative filter, They're going to be destructive, they're going to be pessimistic. All if you believe that your thoughts have power in that way, then if you're going to be consistent with that belief, then that means your negative thoughts have power. And now all of a sudden you have something to be very anxious about, because now you have the power to harm people with your thoughts, or now you have the power to bring bad things into your life because you can't help but think of negative things. You can't help but worry. You can't help but have those random destructive thoughts come in your mind. And what then happens is you become hypervigilant of those thoughts and will become hypervigilant that's all we think about, or are we try to suppress the thoughts. While suppressing your thoughts also leads to you thinking about them more. So, when you think about things more, it can make you believe that they're meaningful. Right, So, if you're thinking about something you don't want to think about it, and then that it keeps popping back in your head and you don't understand the mechanisms of that, then you start thinking, well, it keeps popping back into my head, it must be true, I must I should be thinking about this. This all of a sudden has more meaning. Meanwhile, your brain is rewiring as well, right than, those connections between all of those thoughts are becoming stronger and stronger, And then you end up highly anxious. You might have a whole range of problems related to that. I see a lot of people with where they have You know, part of OCD can be being worried that you're going to do harm to someone, for instance, and they really believe because they thought it, it's going to happen, right, So it leads to all of these compulsions to try to neutralize the thought, neutralize that from eventuating. And part of what I have to do as a psychologist is address the pop culture movement of manifestation and this idea that all of our thoughts are meant to be a certain way, and dispel those kinds of myths and beliefs and say, like, no, we have like up to eighty thousand thoughts a day. A lot of them are going to be destructive, a lot of them are going to be negative. You know, We're going to have visions that you know, visual images in our brains that we're not that are unpleasant. We're going to have memories that we don't particularly like. There's all of these things are normal processes, but we're we can pay attention to every single one of the thoughts that come to our head. What we end up paying attention to is what we practiced paying attention to and given meaning to.
So you talked about attention there.
I actually think that this is a huge part of it is are where our attention actually goes. So in Japanese psychology, which my wife's practitioner, in Marita therapy, and in Stoic philosophy, by the way, similar ways of saying the same thing, but in Japanese psychology they're very overt about it, and they say, the most powerful thing in your life that you have control over is the flashlight of your attention. And as a neuroscientist, I love that because you'll know this as well. Whatever you pay attention to, you brain commit sales to. And in Japanese psychology and Marita therapy they say, the issue is not that you have negative experiences or you're having negative thoughts, they're just that's a quintessential part of being human, right, It's the fact that so many people shine the flashlight of their attention in their own heads for long periods of time. And to your point, if you're having those negative thoughts, you're shining your attention on those negative thoughts, your brain is committing sales to it. It's potentiating you're a migdala. And then you get into the tyranny of the shoots. I shouldn't be having these thoughts and then you throw in this world that we live in with all this advertising and marketing that we should be happy and it's all about happiness, happiness, happiness, and people expect to be happy, and they're shining the flashlight of attention in their own heads and they're trying to fundamentally change reality.
Yeah, because they've been said that this is the version of reality that they've been fed. Yes, And that's the unfortunate part. There's some very very low quality information out there on well being and just misinformation, and unfortunately it's you know, psychologists or mental health professionals or people doing PhDs, you know, like they're not the people that people are listening.
To, like right, like.
They're listening to influencers. They're they're getting a version of the story that's really particular to the person telling it and not generalizable really, but it's presented as if it is and it's I mean, I guess one of the most important skills that we can teach our kids that I have two one seventeen one's fifteen is critical analysis skills. They really need to be able to tell what's good information, what's quality information, and to be able to and know how to check that because you can't necessarily just hell by hearing something. But where do you check out your information? It's so important because it's, like you said, it's what you pay attention to and then meaning you attached to that you know. So if you think that your thoughts are bad or threatening, right, and they can cause bad things to happen, that actually makes sense for you to be really worried about that. Right. That means anxiety is trying to protect you. They're saying, your thoughts are bad, we need to do something about this. I need to be on high alert. So you're going to be paying more attention, unfortunately, instead of less. So it's about dispelling those beliefs and helping people understand that not all your thoughts have meaning. They're not factual. They're sometimes just a string of words in your head that maybe you've practiced over time, and that's why they're bothering you a lot. Doesn't mean that they have meaning and that they need to cause you any distress, and that takes practice. And sometimes it's through things like mindfulness that people can start tolerating, tolerating distressing thoughts without doing anything about it, without reacting to it, excepting that they will happen, and taking more effective action as a result.
Yeah, which is you just summed up acceptance commitment therapy in a sentence, right, which I think is you know, of all the and and you know, I'm not finished my pH d in psychology, but of all the the interventions of the therapies, I'm very drawn to act because it's very similar to Japanese psychology. It's very similar to stoicism. And basically it's like, you know what life's hard, and bad ship will have with bad ship will help. You need to accept that, not try to change reality, but you need to commit to action that's aligned to your values that's going to take you towards the person you want to be, right, And I think that has to be taught in primary schools right from the get go. And don't listen to this crap on social media that says that you should be happy and and you know the other thing about social media, which I think plays into it, is all the comparison stuff that we're comparing ourselves to the best little her brush snapshots of people's lives and thinking that that's the way that our lives should be, which can be really damaging as well, but let's do a deep dive into worry. There's a pretty co research paper that I like to talk about. But they took a bunch of people with generalized anksiety disort of done if you've come across this research paper, and got them to write down everything that they were worried about and in journal, and then they followed them up. I think it was a year later to go through and actually work out what came true and what didn't. And it turns out that ninety one percent of the stuff that people worried about didn't actually come true.
That's right, So like, what the hell is? So what? Why why do we spend so much time worrying? And what can we do about it?
And just before you get into that, I think another quote from the stoic Seneca said, foresight is man's greatest gift and his greatest achilles heal, right, because it helps us to plan for the future and do all those things that we need to do to survive and have a good life. But it also allows us to worry about stuff. So let's unpack worry.
Yeah, I mean, worry is our thoughts expression of anxiety. Right, It's like all the what ifs and all the if onlies. You know, if only is are kind of more aligned with depression, like if only I had done this differently, And you know, rumination.
Because it's about because it's about the past. Yes, where's the one that the future?
Right, So that's more aligned with anxiety. Right. So, but like you, like anxiety, worry serves a function. It's meant to help us protect ourselves and prepare. But again, like anxiety, it's miss it's misfiring sometimes, right, Sometimes we're spending a lot of time worrying over things that will never happen ninety percent of the time. I read that paper as well. I think it was a month later that they they checked and not only was it, they also got them to write how likely it was going to happen based on their gut feeling and based on logic, and both were equally just as inaccurate. So it's really it's really interesting. But we're spending a lot of time if we're anxious, we're spending or depressed, or really, if you think about any mental health condition, worries at the bottom of a lot of them, or at least a significant component, then we're spending a lot of time in our own heads and not focused on what we actually want to do during the day. And we're also spending a lot of time not being able to sleep at night. We're either having trouble falling asleep or we're getting up in the middle of that. We're waking up in the middle of the night with our thoughts, you know, worried about whatever's coming, you know, whatever's coming next. So it's can be functional, but it can also be really dysfunctional, and it's really important to understand the difference. And I don't think most people are actually have been exposed to strategies to deal with worries specifically, So I think it's a really important thing to get out there.
So what that begs the question, what are some strategies that people can actually use to deal with worry.
So one of the main things that people try to do when they worry a lot is tell themselves to stop worrying, right, to stop worrying.
And somebody else tellbody else tails.
Exactly exactly, or they get that message from the just stop, like what are you worried about? But I think I mentioned this earlier. There's there's a study back in the eighties by David Wagner, and you'll know this. You'll know a study that's similar because it's an act thing as well, with the pink elephant. If you tell someone to know about a elephant, that's all they're going to think about. So David Wagner did that study in I think eighty seven or something like that, and but his was the white bear. So he just got people to think for five minutes about whatever they wanted, but said, don't think about a white bear. And of course people can help, but think about the white bear. So they discovered in that research and further research that trying to suppress thoughts not only doesn't work, but it can actually cause a rebound effect, so it can cause you to think about it more later. Now, another researcher called Borkovic was tasked to try to relieve worry for people who had insomnia, and what they came up with was this strategy called worry time. Have you heard of worry time?
Paul?
No?
But can I have a guess at what it might be?
Just from what you said, it's you compartmentalize, you set yourself up block of time or you're going to actively worry and then you do all your worrying intensely, and then you get some cognitivesure because your brand is like avoided about that.
It's all good, yeah, perfect, well done, yeah exactly. So what they actually found was if you tell yourself to stop worrying, that doesn't work. But if you tell yourself to delay it to a specific time, you're more likely to let it go. And then what you're doing also is you're setting a time in a place that's actually convenient for you to actually think through your problems. So you're going to be a lot more effective in dealing with your problems than anyway. And also you're limiting the time that you're thinking about your worries and your problems to that particular amount of time, which is it's suggested to be about fifteen to thirty minutes a day to start with as a practice, so it's not a lot of time. So the idea is to when you're kind of well first to set your time and place to worry, so that might be let's say five point thirty to six every day, and then when you have worries throughout the day, you write them down. So the old school way of doing this that we were talking about, this is a strategy that came out in the eighties was literally writing it down on pieces of paper and then having like a worry box or a worry jar where you store your worries right, and then when you are in your worry time, you just take them out, you know, you can categorize them or do whatever you want to process them and worry about them. Then. Unfortunately, nowadays most people don't really want to write stuff down on pieces of paper. And also it's not the most private and secure way of like dealing with your problems either, Like it's you know, people are much more concerned about privacy, and that's perfectly reasonable as well. So just in the last year and a half, well a couple of years ago, I was having this conversation with a client about worry time, and I could just see that he wasn't going to do it because it was so messy and it just, you know, it just doesn't really go with the modern way that we do things. And I just thought maybe if it was an app, that we would do it. And so I ended up working with a digital designer and we created an app called Contain Your Brain to give people a really practical, modern, and secure way to practice worry time. So what it does is it helped you set your times flexibly across the week. You can set how long you want that time to be up to an hour. We wouldn't want more than an hour, and you can get notifications for that time. But then we and then there's a secure place to store your worries. So throughout the day, you know, if you've got to worry, just quickly add it into the app. You can also voice it in if you don't feel like writing it in, and then when you're in your worry time, we have a really simple framework for people to address their problems effectively. And one of the so we get them to categorize their worries to either solvable worries, unsolvable worries are solved. So the research that you were talking about before, right, mean that ninety percent of the worries are likely to be in the solved category. And if they choose that category, what happens is they get tips that are related to that category. Right, So if you choose something that's already been solved or something that happened but it didn't turn out as badly as you thought, which is the other thing that usually happens. Then the behavior or the action we want people to take is really to reflect on those What are all those worries that are taking up all of your time that you actually don't need to worry about, because once you know what they are, when they come back in your brain, you'd be like, oh, yeah, those are one of those ones that'll solve themselves. Be much easier to let those go. And if you can let ninety percent of your worries go, you're already saving so much mind time. Right, you can focus better during the day, probably sleep better at night. But the other category, so the solvable category. With that one you would get problem solving tips. I think most people are pretty comfortable with the worries that they can do something about, but if they wanted some problem solving tips, they can get that in the app. It's the unsolvable worries that are the problem. It's the ones that we can't do anything about, we don't have any control over, or we're not in the power to do anything about them, or they're just the reality of life and there's literally nothing to be done. Those are the problems. Or you know, something's happened in the past and you can't change it. Those are the ones that play on our minds, and so we offer tips to deal with those unsolvable worries too, and are tips that are based in and underpinned by ACT therapy, but also dialectical behavior therapy and also cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology as well. But there are things that are about how do you tolerate the distress and not being able to solve this problem? How do you accept reality as it is? How do you refocus your attention on something that's better for you to focus on. How do you how can you use gratitude to assist you? How do you how can you be self compassionate rather than judgemental of yourself? Those kinds of things. So that's really all it is. It's a very simple app and it just gives people a really kind of easy way to Like you said, it's a compartmentalizing strategy that will reduce the frequency of your worry but also help you solve your problems more effectively if you can accept the problems that you have more effectively and also read yourself of all those little ones that really don't matter that are taking up your mind, so that you can focus on the ones that are actually the most important.
That is genius.
I mean, I think that the concept of worry time in and of itself is quite quite genius. But I like the fact that you've brought the technology in because, as you rightly say, a lot of people don't want to write stuff down. But also that you're bringing in one of the key stoic concepts epic titius, the very first line of the encredy on of things.
Some are up to us and others are not.
And that's that whole stoic concept of everything in your life is in two zones. You know, the stuff that is up to you and the stuff that's not to you, And you've got to focus your energy on the stuff that's up to you and refuse to.
Invest your energy.
But I think what's nice is that you're then giving people problem solving tips, so rather than avoiding stuff, they're actually using problem solved in our problem solving focused skills rather than just that avoidant stuff. So that's awesome. I love the concept of that. And now that that whole worry thing brings us very nicely into sleep and actually talking about worry time, I remember years ago when I was running workshops talking to people about a dump pad. So this was just a little pad that you have beside your bed. So people who were worriers, I would get them to write down all the stuff they were worried about so that they had some cognitive closure. And there was a lady who was in I works up who had in so many for years, and a couple of months later she wrote to me and said that just was a complete and utter game changer, because everybody will get I'm so tired of being really stressed. I've had a stress to day. I'm going to be asleep in five seconds. They lie down, their head hits the pillow, and the brain goes on fire. Right, So worry obviously plays really really strongly into sleep. But we know also that if you are sleep deprived, it massively increases your risk of common mental health disorders anxiety depression. We know that if you're self medicating to get to sleep with either alcohol or marijuana, that impacts upon not only deep sleep, but ram sleep, and I think Dutch researchers in twenty nineteen showed that ram sleep is kind of like nightly therapy for the Brian where you re play the day's events, but in the absence of no epinephrin. What I thought was freaking amazing that during ram sleep, you're brilliant blocks the release of no epineffrin from the locus aurelius, so you can remember that event in a less stressful situation, which.
Is just so cool. But let's let's talk about sleep.
I think I think everybody gets the importance of sleep for not just good mental health but good physical health. But what are some of the things that people can do as well as using the app or that physical worry time of the dump pod. What other sorts of strategies do you have. I mean, we know that CBTI is probably the most effective interventions.
Yeah, there's a range of interventions that people can use for insomnia, which is difficulty falling or staying asleep. I think what's really important is for you to understand the source of the problem for you. There's a lot of advice out there, and yeah, CBTI strategies are super useful, but they're not useful if that's not your problem. Right, So is your problem temperature, light noise? If it is, then yeah, put your thermostat at the right level and make sure, you've got curtains that cover all the light and try to you know, manage noise, maybe where earplugs or something like that. That's that can be really helpful. Worry actually is probably one of the the main issues getting in the way of sleep. If I when I talk to people and they tell me, and a lot of people talk about how they can't sleep, it's it's quite prolific. And I say, well, what gets in the way, It's like, ah, my mind is racing. Well, yeah, that's what it is. So if your mind is racing, then why did you buy blue light glasses like that? That's not going to help you with your mind, right, So it's like, understand what the problem is, what's the source of the issue, and do something about that. So, yes, so there might be things about your environment, which we just talked about. There might be things about what you do during the day, like, for instance, the client that I saw with the coffee and the cigarettes and the you know, if you're drinking a lot of coke and processed foods and cheese just before bed, and chocolate and you know, all of those things can interfere with sleep at night. Sometimes it's about your routine just before bed that can interfere or that you could change to make it more conducive to being relaxed and falling asleep. Light has a lot to do with it, so you want to be getting really nice early morning natural sunlight if you can, really helpful for your circadian rhythms and making sure that melatonin is working in the right way and firing when it needs to fire, and so yeah, light in the morning and dimming your lights at night. You know, if you're watching TV, that's fine, just but turn off all the other lights in the house. You know they don't need to be on. So that can really get you ready for sleep as well. If you're really having trouble falling and falling asleep and staying asleep, sometimes having the routine of going to bed at the exact same time and waking up at the exact same time can be very helpful. But there are other things like if it's a chronic problem, I would say see a sleep specialist. There are a lot of things as sleep specialists can do with you that it would be very hard to do on your own. So there's sleep restriction therapy, for instance, which is kind of a method of basically just staying in bed for the only the time that you're sleeping for. So they it's a calculation that they do and I have I have an online course and a book that describes how that's done, and so you could potentially do it if you really wanted to, but it would be very hard for you to do it by yourself. You would it would be much better if you saw a sleep specialist. And also you can do it.
There was sorry Leon, there was a guy I think he's from it's one of the Melbourne universities, but he developed this ring and I actually was was I got one of them because he was doing a little pilot study where basically it was four people with insomnia and they would have this ring on and they would go to bed and every fifteen minutes it would it would buzz and they'd have to get out of bed. So what it did is a created massive sleep pressure. And within three nights of doing this, like people got so bloody tired with the sleep pressure that you know that they're they're ins many got massively improved and that that was an extreme form of that sleep restriction. But I think one of the issues people have is they just line bit and they toss and turn, don't they And they should really be getting up, going to another room, read a book, do some breathing, do something.
Really sharing it. One of the things that can really help though, also is especially if you're going through a lot of stress in your current kind of circumstances, is to try to lower your overall stress levels. And one of the best ways that you can do that is by practicing progressive muscle relaxation. So that's yes, yeah, that relaxation exercise that involves tensing and then relaxing your muscles in your body in a systematic way, and you can do that during the day to reduce your stress and anxiety levels, but you can also do them before you go to bed. One of the things I've done over the years is record lots of these kinds of exercises and they're all on Spotify or inside time or for free if people want to go access them. But I have a progressive muscle relaxation exercise for stress and anxiety that people can do during the day, and then I also have one for sleep that they can do at night.
And.
It can be, like I said, really helpful to reduce your overall level of stress and anxiety, but it can also be really helpful just to reduce it in that moment where you want to get to sleep or do something that's going to cause you anxiety.
And the other thing I would say is don't do cognitively stimulating activities combined with blue light just before you go to bed, So get off your bloody phone and don't be on social media just before you go to bed, because yeah, and just going to stimulate stuff.
Well, yes, and I think it's probably more an issue of tearing yourself away from social media than it is about the light that's actually coming through. But yeah, it's not it's not the best thing to do to be doing stimulating activities, like you know there and everyone's level of that is different, right, So it's not like blanket statement about what's what's too stimulating for one person might not be for another person, but just knowing yourself and being aware within yourself what gets in the way, And sometimes it's not obvious and other times it's like, oh, like for me, I had about of not being able to sleep and I was like, what is actually happening? And I realized I don't drink that much coffee. I drink like one a day. But I think I noticed that week I had the coffee after two pm, like it was like late afternoon, Like, maybe that's what it is, And so I just stopped drinking coffee after two and it fixed it. Like it's just a kind of being aware of like, what what are you doing that could be impeding on this, what could be the source of the problem, and then targeting that.
No, look, you're absolutely right.
Some people are caffeine sensitive, right, depends on what version of the CYP one A two gene that you have. That some people that's actually true, but some people if they have a couple of cups of coffee. You know, there are most people that the average half life is about six hours, but for some people who are slow processors, that half.
Life can be ten twelve rs.
Right.
And then so if they're having two, they're trying to go to sleep, and they've got caffeine in their brain at stimulant levels, and it's a pretty stimulant, that's the thing. Right, Yeah, that's right, Lily, And look, this has been absolutely awesome. I think we've covered so many topics on this that are are intertwined, and I think that's The important thing is that your thoughts, your worry, your sleep, your practice, your sleep, high gen practices, all of those things interact with each other. Where can people go to find out more about your courses to download your app?
Presumably there's there's a website and other things.
Yes, there are, well, my probably the best place is doctor Lilliannaja dot com and you'll see everything there. And if you wanted to get more information about the app, that would be contain your Brain dot com. And you can also just download that straight from the app store.
Cool. What a great what a great name for it. Thank you.
You must have been like when you come up with that, you must have just been like, yes, nieled it.
That's so funny. I actually because I've been talking about worry time for years, so I've been calling it Contain your Brain for like ten years. So when we thought about when I thought about doing the app, I'm like, well, this is what it's going to be named. I've already come up with the name, and I was really pleased that it wasn't taken, you know, like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's that's that's brilliant and this this has been awesome, So thank you for sharing your time. And look, there's no doubt that if people listen to this and and start to implement some of the strategies and it will definitely have an impact. And if you're a warrior, you got a bit of anxiety, continue, Brian.
Dot com, Off you go.
Thanks for take action, right, don't just think about it, get into action mode.
That's right,
